Jeremy looks at the pre-manifesto for this year’s European elections

“I quite like some of your policies, and your local councillors seem good, but I don’t agree with you on Europe”. How many times have you heard something like this from a closing door after asking someone on the doorstep if they will be voting for us on polling day?

Too often the public think the Liberal Democrats just always blindly support anything to do with Europe, suspending our critical faculties whenever it is mentioned.

This pre-manifesto for the European elections is a welcome chance to challenge that. And in fact we have a clearer vision of how we want Europe to be more democratic and more effective than any of the other parties.

Yes, we believe Britain’s future lies in us being a leading member of the European Union.

But we also very much want to see the EU doing more to tackle the challenges European citizens face, and to tackle its own internal failings.

It sets out how we don’t want responsibility for lots of new areas, like health, education and social security, to pass to the EU, but instead to remain national or regional responsibilities.

We want to see the EU under much better democratic control, with a much bigger role for the European public through the democratically-accountable Parliament we elect every five years.

We want to see ‘a constitution for the EU that defines and limits the powers of the Union, protecting the fundamental rights of citizens and simplifying the procedures of decision-making.’

We want to replace the discredited Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) with a Food and Rural Policy. We want to reform the over-centralised Common Fisheries Policy.

We want to make the EU ‘the world champion of the environment’.

We want to improve European transport, and make it easier to get around the continent.

We want to make it easier for British companies to sell goods or services in Europe, including by joining the Euro.

We want to tackle cross-border crime, and make EU external border controls more effective.

We want to have a much more effective capacity for Europe to act strongly together in foreign and security policy, where we agree.

You can see too in this European pre-manifesto what all those MEPs we elected back in 1999 have been up to. Each page has a little yellow box with a concrete example of something one of our eleven MEPs has done to improve the lives of British and other EU citizens – something our Westminster MPs would love to be able to point to.

And it has little blue boxes on each page explaining how the EU delivers practical benefits to us all.

If you’re looking for a worthy but dull statement of obscure European issues, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re looking for a dynamic view of how Europe makes our daily lives better, and how we want it to change, you’re in luck.