Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-01-18-Speech-2-307"
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"en.20000118.10.2-307"2
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"Mr President, I want to thank Mr van Hulten for his report and to say that I voted for it. So I refer to the things I do not agree with.
I do not agree with the paragraphs in relation to Parliament. This report is about the Commission. Parliament is a separate subject. There is no need for us to bring Parliament into the discussion on the Commission.
In addition to that, there is the question of duty-free. That was a stick used to beat the Commission by the duty-free lobbies who resented the fact that the Commission abolished duty-free in airports. It is not worthy of being brought into this report either.
Most of the report is about financial control. That is reasonable because it comes from the Budgetary Control Committee. But we should not create the impression that vast amounts of European resources are being put at risk by carelessness in the European Commission. After all, it is only 1% of GDP, by comparison with national spending. We have had all that before but some people in this Parliament are young and do not seem to understand how small the financial resources of the European Union are and that 80% of these resources are spent by the Member States. So carelessness within the Commission in the spending of money is not likely to put at risk vast quantities of money. We should get it into perspective. It is important to remember that.
The business of the European Commission is very little about spending money. They have very little of it. They have a much wider responsibility. That wider responsibility concerns the management of the environment, food safety, foreign trade, the internal market and so many other responsibilities we have given them without the resources to deal with them.
I am not one of the people who agrees that there is a vast lack of trust. If there is, we have generated it in this House in the past year. I have been here for 20 years and found absolute trust between the Council, the Commission and Parliament. We have had our problems and we recognised difficulties but there was not a situation where this bureaucratic Commission was mistrusted, doubted and feared by the citizens of the European Union because they were mismanaging our affairs. That is a gross exaggeration of what the difficulties were. This Commission should not have to live forever in the shadow of the mistakes that caused the resignation of the Commission that went before it. While there were problems – and we have to resolve them in view of enlargement, for instance – we sometimes take the negative side too far."@en1
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