Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-09-05-Speech-2-143"
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"en.20000905.10.2-143"2
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"Mr President, Mr Hughes says he does not want a new agency and yet his resolution plainly calls for a new agency and to deny it is merely playing with words. He says he wants no interference in industry, and yet Mrs Diamantopoulou talks about preventive measures. She clearly thinks that change is a bad thing. She wants to keep loss-making industries on life-support systems when we should be releasing the resources of labour and capital so that they can work in viable new enterprises. If we want to survive and prosper in the 21st century then we must welcome and manage change. We must not monitor and prevent it. So I was deeply disheartened to hear of this proposal for an observatory. The rule seems to be: another day, another quango.
For the benefit of colleagues I should perhaps explain that a quango is a recently-coined English word short for "quasi non-governmental organisation", in other words, a new piece of bureaucracy, more money spent, more jobs for the boys, more patronage for their bosses. And all for what? To produce fat reports which will be translated into 11 languages but which nobody will read.
We seem to have only two responses in the EU to any real or imagined problem. We either create a new regulation without any concern as to whether existing regulations are working properly or we create an observatory. Then we stand back proud and happy that we have solved the problem. But we have not solved the problem. We have simply postponed it. We have wasted time and money and we have raised expectations which will not be fulfilled. As with so many EU initiatives – I am thinking particularly of the proposed food standards agency – this observatory will simply duplicate the work of other organisations, of innumerable private research companies and accountancy firms, of academic and university institutes, of trade unions and chambers of commerce, and national and local government.
I put two questions to colleagues. First, do we need this observatory at all? I think not. But if we do, would it not be far quicker, cheaper and more cost-effective to commission one of our great European accounting firms to do the work? I am sure it would."@en1
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