Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-13-Speech-1-033"
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"en.20000313.2.1-033"2
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"Mr President, the Lisbon Summit will produce a further string of fine words to dazzle us with. The words will be welcome, but the basic problem is that we have an Economic and Monetary Union which attaches more importance to fighting inflation than to promoting employment. The Central Bank has said that price rises should always be kept below 2%. The Stability Pact says that the budget deficit must be no more than 1% in ordinary years. There is no requirement that unemployment should be below 5% or – better still – below 2 or 1%. It is public consumption and the price of money which definitely must not rise. You might think that a country would wish to limit unemployment by means of public investment, but that is prohibited. It is more important to stick to the holy cow of monetary policy than to find jobs for the unemployed. I, on the other hand, think it is more important to take account of families’ finances and to ensure that dad comes home with a wage packet instead of a redundancy notice. So too did the Danish Government which came to power in 1993. In 1992 we had 9.2% unemployment, both in Denmark and in the eleven countries of the good old EU. Between 1992 and 1998, unemployment in Denmark fell to 5.1%. In the EU, it increased to 10.9%. In Denmark, we have had combined growth of 20%, compared with 10% in the EU. If the Danish Government had acted in the same way under the present dispensation, it would have been downright illegal and unconstitutional because the budget deficit was 3.9% at that time. Now, Denmark also has an actual budget surplus because those who exchanged their redundancy notices for wage packets also began to pay tax instead of drawing benefit. I believe that the EU’s prime ministers ought to study the Danish example when they meet for their tête-à-tête on the economy in Lisbon. We need a change to the EMU Treaty instead of a further string of fine words directed at the unemployed. My group hopes that Danish voters will decide to keep the Danish krone when they take part in the referendum on membership of EMU on 28 September of this year."@en1
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