Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-03-10-Speech-1-097"
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"en.20030310.5.1-097"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, we have reached our second reading, a milestone on the long, hard road towards liberalising port services, and I think that we should all start by thanking and congratulating our rapporteur, Mr Jarzembowski, on a job well done.
Having said which, I realise that as soon as I sit down, a number of my honourable friends will no doubt stand up to oppose liberalisation or at least make comments intended to severely restrict the liberalisation of port services. What I have to say to all these honourable Members, whose opinion I do of course respect, is that I fail to understand how we can be in favour of liberalising the railways, in favour of liberalising air transport, in favour of liberalising telecommunications, and against liberalising port services. We cannot have one sauce for the goose and one for the gander. I, for one, find it incomprehensible.
Secondly, I should like to say to everyone – and to the port workers protesting today – that, in my personal opinion, they stand to benefit from the liberalisation of port services in the medium to long term, because it will create new jobs. We have nothing against these people. On the contrary, we recognise that their work helps foster economic growth; but they should not hamper further liberalisation and, by extension, further growth in the European economy. The European Parliament, at least the majority in committee, has so far stood by a number of firm principles, one of these firm principles being our espousal of the liberalisation of services, not as an end in itself, but as a means to economic growth. And because we stand by this principle, Commissioner, we adopted an amendment, which the rapporteur referred to and which is designed to prevent discriminatory treatment by port authorities, so that the ports of the European Union can compete with each other. In doing so, we did of course listen very carefully to what the industry and interested parties had to say. That is why we stand by our position on pilotage, where idiosyncrasies, different approaches and safety factors have to be taken into account. It is why we take a different view from the Council, a more amicable view if you like, of workers’ demands and the question of self-handlers. Our focus is on proper staff training, which is why I think that port workers’ current demands on the question of self-handling are somewhat exaggerated. This being our position, and in the light of the position taken by the Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism when it voted for the report, I think this is the right approach if we and the Council are to push through legislation which is acceptable to all sides as quickly as possible."@en1
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