Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-20-Speech-3-022"
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"en.20020320.5.3-022"2
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"Mr President, in his last editorial published yesterday in the
Professor Marco Biagi listed the results of the Barcelona Summit and called for the Member States, particularly Italy, to pay more heed to the Council’s demands for labour market reforms. He paid for his ideas on labour market flexibility and welfare reform, for his efforts to help governments make his ideas reality, with his life. Our unfailing response to violence must be to turn devotedly to democracy, to its familiar rules, to its dialectic and its capacity to enable dialogue and disputes – even where
there is bitter feeling
to be conducted in a non-violent manner. However, we cannot fail to condemn the way, in recent days, people in positions of great responsibility in Italy with wide media coverage have adopted a cynical, populist approach to the reforms called for by the European institutions and strongly advocated by Marco Biagi, labelling them barbarous, cruel and a violation of fundamental rights.
President-in-Office of the Council, we are in danger of making Lisbon an all-purpose slogan; indeed, it might be better if we were to stop invoking the decision made by European leaders two years ago to make the European economy the best and most innovative economy in the world within the space of ten years, almost as if the previous leaders might have planned to do the opposite. In my opinion, we should only discuss reforms and goals which have or have not been achieved. I do not want to undermine the decisions of the Barcelona Summit, but I feel that we are once again in danger of setting new priorities and new goals without having made tangible, incisive progress on what we had planned to do. I am referring, of course, by way of example, to the liberalisation of the electricity markets. We do welcome the fact that some steps forward have been taken, but our predominant feeling is one of dissatisfaction at what has not been done, at the failure to achieve full liberalisation for household users too.
I therefore feel that our conclusion must be that the best possible result was achieved at Barcelona, but that this result is not good enough if our goal is to see Europe compete on the international markets, most importantly the United States market. We must do more, we must step on the reform peddle.
As regards the coordination of economic policies, as mentioned by President Prodi, I want to remind myself, the House and the President-in-Office of the Council that Europe does not need coordinated economic policies so much as sound economic policies, and history has shown that the two do not always go together."@en1
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