Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-24-Speech-2-264"
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"en.20020924.11.2-264"2
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"Mr President, experience has taught me that when bureaucrats and politicians resort to jargon, citizens should guard their wallets. What is one supposed to make of the phrasing used to proclaim that one of the aims of the Marco Polo programme is to maintain the module repetition of freight transport at its 1998 levels by promoting a modal shift from road to other transport modes?
Another gem was the heading 'optimism in infrastructure capacity and logistical concepts'. This sort of mindless gobbledegook means as much to the ordinary citizen of Europe as a text in ancient Sanskrit. The Commission needs to learn that transparency is not about putting things on the website. It is about writing in clear, jargon-free language that ordinary people can understand.
As to the substantive issue of reducing road congestion and improving the environmental performance of the transport system, I note that this ambitious aim is to be funded to the tune of EUR 115 million over 5 years. That is just EUR 23 million a year to be spent Europe-wide between 15 Member States – or is it to be 25 Member States? Frankly, even if this aim could be achieved by the Commission's financial instrument – and I share Mr Bradbourn's scepticism on this – the amount of money allocated would hardly begin to dent the problem. As always, the Community's ambitions are bigger than our pockets. Therein lies the problem. The money being spent belongs to the taxpayers of Europe, it is drawn from national governments, each of which has its own unique problems. Thus, as always, the Commission is looking for a European problem that does not exist on a European level and then failing to address it.
Mr Bradbourn's traffic-light solution, however, hardly seems appropriate. The problem in eastern England, the region I represent, is that we have neither decent roads nor decent railways. Yet improving infrastructure would cost more in my part of England than the whole of the budget allocated to this scheme. Given such a pathetic response from the Commission and the clear evidence that this House does not have any better solutions, it would be better to leave transport improvements to national governments. Our government in particular seems well capable of making its own mess of our transport policy without any help from the Commission and its jargon."@en1
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