Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-02-14-Speech-3-344"
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"en.20010214.11.3-344"2
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"Mr President, this EU-Mexico agreement gives me an opportunity to say that it makes a lovely change for the European Parliament to be discussing free trade, something to which it usually pays just lip service.
When this agreement was completed, however, my first thought was lucky Mexico. Here is a country which can enter into a trade agreement with the EU without having to join the club, without having to pay the membership fee or take on thousands of directives and regulations every year. Why can't the UK do the same I thought.
On another level I must highlight the observations of the rapporteur that there is an increased sensitivity amongst Members of Parliament about who makes the decisions on trade: whether it is the Council or the Commission. Actually that sensitivity is not confined to this Parliament. Many of my party members and constituents share that sensitivity and are alarmed at the Nice developments which seem to place far too much power in the hands of unelected Commission officials. That is to say that I would not be content if the power was vested elsewhere in the EU, because the greatest sensitivity is that we as a country are having trade agreements affecting the UK negotiated and finalised by a third party, which may or may not be entirely in our national interests. Further, as to conflict resolution procedures based as they are on a WTO model, we have already experienced the banana war where innocent British companies have been penalised for matters which have nothing to do with them and over which they have no control whatsoever.
Altogether we are happy that the EU and Mexico have reached an agreement but we do not believe that the UK should be bound by it. We would much rather make our own agreements on our own terms."@en1
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