The emphatic rejection of a proposal to give the EU more power to regulate the forestry sector in Europe should be yet another wake-up call to the Commission to stop encroaching on Member States' prerogatives.

That’s the view of Beatrice Timgren MEP, who welcomed the vote in the Committee on the Environment as a demonstration of the ECR’s commitment to true subsidiarity, blocking the Commission from grabbing powers unjustifiably.

Ms Timgren, who led for the ECR Group in the committee on the Commission’s proposal to establish an EU-wide forest monitoring system, said the plan was now “dead in the water” and called for the Commission to withdraw it.

She added that the defeat of the proposal in committee “shows that the ECR is leading the fight against excessive regulation.”

Ms Timgren said:

“Hopefully the Commission will soon start to accept the limits of its powers and stop proposing laws that intrude on the powers of national governments.

“The political shift since the European election last year has demonstrated that ‘more Europe’ is not what most people want to see.

“It’s a vote that demonstrates the Parliament’s impatience with poorly drafted and over-zealous legislation that is essentially a thinly disguised effort to grab more power.”