Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-02-28-Speech-3-077"
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"en.20010228.5.3-077"2
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"Mr President, the BSE crisis, or ‘mad cow disease’, is being presented to us rather as if it were one of the ten plagues of Egypt. However, this disease affecting livestock in Europe is not the result of a curse. Cows did not go mad because they ate grass, or even smoked it. Cows have gone mad because they have been given a dose of politics. Cows have gone mad because they have had to swallow the common agricultural policy that the European Commission has forced down their throats for nigh on thirty years.
Basically, this intensive policy and these animal feeds are the result of the decisions taken by Member States and the Commission, particularly, let us admit it, by the French Government, by the French agricultural unions, why not admit that as well, but also by the Commission, particularly in the international agreements which favoured European cereal producers over American-grown soya bean meal.
At this point, we may need to have the courage to confront European opinion head on. Europe is guilty. Europe must make amends. To my mind, the taxpayer in France or any Member State should not have to pay twice for this. The European Union does not actually levy taxes. When it is brave enough to levy taxes, it will perhaps be able to take on its own policies, but Europe does not levy taxes and there is no question of taxpayers paying twice over, firstly through the Community budget and then through their national budgets.
It is, nonetheless, utterly inconceivable that the European Union should be splitting up, essentially in the rift between the European project, with a monopoly on great prospects and plans for the future and the nation states or Member States which are being turned into leper colonies designed to contain European policies, as they are fulfilling the same function as the pesthouses of the Middle Ages, right down to the quarantines."@en1
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