Adam Fergusson (MEP) - European Parliament

European Parliament

For three years, Fergusson acted as spokesman for the European Democratic Group on political affairs. He supported calls for a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, arguing that the invasion of Afghanistan and the internal exile of Andrei Sakharov showed the two sides of the Soviet Union: "Aggression without, and oppression within". When Barbara Castle criticised the expenses of the European Parliament, he described her as "the single most damaging export the United Kingdom has on its hands today".

When in 1982 the European Union proposed that the electoral system for European Parliament elections be changed to the party list, Fergusson led the Conservative MEPs' opposition. He kept up constant pressure on the government of Poland over its crackdown on Solidarity, and condemned not only the USSR over the shootdown of Korean Air Flight 007, but the Greek government (which had failed to issue its own condemnation). He was a rapporteur in late 1983, bringing in a report which called for European co-operation on arms manufacture; and for a proposal to install an Empty Chair in the parliament, symbolically waiting for Eastern European countries to be liberated and join the European Community.

He was for twenty years from 1981 a vice president of the Pan-European Union.