Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-05-18-Speech-4-117"
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"en.20000518.4.4-117"2
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"I voted for Mr Ferber’s report on our budget for 2001, but I cannot let this opportunity pass without protesting in the strongest terms against what can only be described as the blackmail practised against certain categories of officials, particular more junior ones, so that they find themselves ‘voluntarily compelled’ to transfer from Luxembourg to Brussels, on the pretext that they are in Brussels or Strasbourg ‘
’, i.e. on business, for more than 50 working days per year.
The European Parliament now has three places of work: Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. This was agreed by the Heads of State and Government at their summit in Edinburgh years ago. We have to live with this, and with its financial consequences, which are not so great, and which are certainly justified by avoiding unhealthy centralisation in Brussels, as is unfortunately practised by a good third of the present Members of the European Parliament.
We are now suffering from an example of this centralisation at the hands of certain Green Members, who prevented a number of important votes on the Friday of the April Strasbourg part-session, because the quorum of one third of the Members present was not established.
I have been a Member of this Parliament since 1965, with a break between 1974 and 1989, so I have 20 years’ of attendance behind me, during which time I was present at every Friday sitting in Strasbourg. The flimsy arguments put forward by those who want to reduce the European Parliament’s five-day week in Strasbourg to four days, and who would also prefer not to turn up here on Mondays, are part of their salami tactics, which are obviously aimed at sabotaging Parliament’s seat in Strasbourg for 12 sittings each year, not to mention their objective of transferring the offices of the Secretariat from Luxembourg to Brussels.
The Bureau now intends to present a working paper by a British Vice-President which proposes moving all the services and Directorates-General from Luxembourg to Brussels. The idea is to keep at most the specialist services such as the printing and translating services in Luxembourg. This cannot and will not happen. It would be a clear infringement of the letter and the spirit of the decisions made by the Heads of State and Government about Parliament’s places of work, and this needs to be said here in the clearest possible terms.
I have a word of warning for those people who are using these salami tactics against Strasbourg and Brussels. We will thwart your highly undemocratic machinations against democratically reached decisions about Parliament’s places of work and about the calendar of meetings – because we have right on our side."@en1
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