Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-07-03-Speech-1-092"
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"en.20000703.6.1-092"2
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". – Mr President, I can reply very briefly because my honourable friend Mr Beazley – and I use the expression in both a personal and a parliamentary sense – asked me a direct question in a speech which perhaps would have been better received in Berlin than in Paris or London.
The honourable Member asked me how I saw the relationship between the institutions – between the Council, the Commission and Parliament. I can answer very directly: in my own area it is a subject about which I have made one or two speeches recently. I am absolutely clear that I do not want to see any increase in the Commission's competences in the area for which I am responsible. I want us to manage those competences more efficiently, and I want us to be allowed to exercise those competences fully to support the development of a common foreign and security policy. In my judgment it is not a question of our seeking to take new powers, it is a question of our seeking to exercise the powers that we have already been given by the Treaty. We should be trying to exercise those powers in a way that is even more democratically accountable.
Let me give the honourable Member an indication of what I mean. We have to apply to the budgetary authority – to Parliament and the Council – for the level of our commitments in external relations every year, but we should be involved in a much more open dialogue with the budgetary authority about the direction in which those spending commitments should go. There should be a more serious exchange about our political priorities. So, to answer the honourable Member again, I want us to manage much better what we are already charged with doing. I want us to be allowed to get on with it, and I want us to be as accountable as possible to this Parliament and to the Council for what we are doing. Our aspirations are as simple and as straightforward as that, and they have the great advantage of reflecting what is written in the treaties.
Finally, I should like to pay one last compliment in the direction of the Portuguese Presidency at the end of its term. It was, I repeat, a great pleasure to work with the Portuguese Government, with its ministers and its extremely hard-working officials. Speaking as somebody who during the course of a fairly long and not, I hope, entirely misspent political life, has sat under a number of chairmen, I do not think I have ever sat under a chairman who was better, more competent, more decisive or more courteous than the Prime Minister of Portugal."@en1
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