Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-04-03-Speech-2-046"
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"en.20010403.3.2-046"2
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"Mr President, first of all I want to say that we very often discuss the budget as if it were an end in itself. We argue about amendments that the European public will not understand. We debate the difference between commitments and appropriations and all sorts of technical details that mean nothing to the European public. These things are necessary, but they should not be the picture that is presented to the people of Europe. The people of Europe want a budget that serves their interests and a budget that serves the political objectives of the European Union. This is extremely important. The long-term objectives of the European Union should be served as best we can by the budget. In sitting down to draw up our long-term plans we should recognise the interests of the Union, its cohesiveness, its solidarity and its influence in the world.
We are being misled at the moment on the whole question of the size of the budget. Mr Wynn says that the Council says there is no more money: absolute rubbish! There was a time when we had a limit of 1.1%. I went around the cities of Europe with Mr Colom i Naval and others and we asked them to sanction expansion of the budget by the 1.27% – we needed at the time. We got it – and very responsibly we did not spend it. It is still there. We now have a crisis in agriculture particularly and that crisis needs to be addressed.
In Berlin we did not foresee that we were going to have a foot-and-mouth crisis and we did not foresee the BSE crisis either. We are, therefore, in a new situation and it is misleading and incorrect to say there is no money to resolve it. When we had swine fever, we gave EUR 800 million to German and Dutch farmers. Today, when the British farmers have a major problem, are we going to change the rules of the game and refuse to give the British farmers the assistance to which they are entitled under the Treaties? We cannot change the rules and we cannot deny it to them. Their own government has crucified them by refusing to allow them into the single currency. The European Union cannot add insult to that injury by saying that it is not its responsibility that they have a serious problem in the area of foot-and-mouth. If the Council insists there is a limit, we have to insist that it is 1.27%. There is plenty of money to resolve the problem for the next two years and following that we can still have that 1.27% which I hope will finance enlargement."@en1
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