Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-11-06-Speech-3-067"
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"en.20021106.6.3-067"2
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"Mr President, the European Council has taken an historic and welcome decision on enlargement of the European Union, but what a pity that it did not seize the opportunity to take another historic decision in radically reforming the common agricultural policy. The EUR 40 billion a year that the European Union spends on the CAP is an expensive way to distort our farming industry. British citizens, who already contribute disproportionately to the EU budget, pay twice for the CAP: once through their taxes, and again in the supermarket. An opportunity for early reform has been lost.
The question of European defence policy was also addressed by the European Council. The United Kingdom has a special interest and responsibility in this area. After all, it was the British Prime Minister who gave the green light to this misguided policy in 1998 and now he has promised significant elements of Britain's already over-stretched armed forces to fill any capability gaps given the complete lack of willingness on the part of most other European countries to upgrade their defence capabilities in any meaningful way.
At the very moment when we should be concentrating on meeting the terrorist threat and on possible conflict with Iraq, the defence annexes to the Presidency Conclusions are Ruritanian in their complexity and in their irrelevance. To add to the confusion and waste, European allies are now toying with two separate sets of military capability improvements: those for NATO and those for the European Union. Resources are scarce and the last thing we need is two different sets of capability goals.
For over a year now, diplomatic and military staff energy has been wastefully expended on negotiating EU access to NATO resources. This is an entirely self-generated problem which, furthermore, raises unnecessary difficulties for key allies such as Turkey.
We now have the very dangerous involvement of the European Convention in defence matters. One of its working groups is examining ways in which even collective defence, a core task of NATO, might become a European Union responsibility. What signal does this send to our American allies? Perhaps more significantly, what signal does this send to potential enemies?
What a pity it is that the Council and the Commission do not focus their efforts on putting the European Union house in order before enlargement instead of grandiose
political schemes."@en1
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