Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-05-13-Speech-2-029"
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"en.20030513.2.2-029"2
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"Mr President, for as long as mankind has been here on earth, he has been polluting. The more people there are, the more sophisticated they become, the worse that pollution potentially gets.
Some damage, given human nature and the fallen world we live in, is inevitable. Self-evidently, prevention is the first priority and in any event, pollution should be kept to a minimum. But where it does occur, those responsible should make amends. What we must recognise, however, is that much of what creates a threat to our environment may not only be helping mankind in other ways but may actually be helping the environment itself.
This legislation is a piece of civil, not criminal, law. It is not about punishing wrongdoers but apportioning and allocating responsibility for environmental damage. Punishment should be meted out by criminal sanctions not civil liability. There are others who see this as a skirmish in some kind of Manichean struggle between the public sector, which is good, and the private sector, which is bad. Such 20th-century class warfare has no place today. The two are complementary. They are interdependent and responsibility for the consequences of pollution should be shared and allocated between them. The private sector cannot and should not walk away from the consequences of its actions, and the public sector, and indeed society and the public at large cannot wash their hands and privatise the responsibilities incurred in regulating the private sector while enjoying the benefits which accrue from their actions.
Further, since pollution is a practical problem, remedial actions must be practical too. Fantasy solutions are as detrimental as pollution itself.
It is for these reasons that the British Conservatives support the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market's amendments to the draft directive. They are not perfect and we expect to see improvements in second reading as the Council further refines European thinking on this important topic. But they represent a further responsible step on the journey of dealing with the consequences of pollution across Europe and the wider world."@en1
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