Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-04-Speech-4-012"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20031204.1.4-012"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Mr President, I too should like to extend my thanks to the Court of Auditors for a brilliant report and, at the same time, thank them for the many excellent items of information we receive from the Court of Auditors throughout the year.
It is of course unnecessary to repeat in this House all the views so excellently expressed by my fellow MEPs. I shall be content to state that we are faced with two problems. The first is the number of impossible administrative systems, and the second is low morale in the administration. As Mr Sjöstedt said in this House, it is of course entirely true that the repeated signing of contracts with companies that have behaved quite unacceptably is inadmissible and that the Commission should simply have avoided having anything to do with such companies. Like my fellow MEP, Mr Kuhne, I must also say that one’s strongest emotion is really one of sympathy with the Commission. When, time after time, I listen to the Commissioners in the Committee on Budgetary Control, I think of a man armed only with a driving licence, sitting alone six miles above the ground in the cockpit of a Boeing 767 with no idea of how to land it.
When we look at the problems we confront now that the EU has existed for 46 years, we cannot but observe that the whole problem lies in the attempt to solve problems that simply should not be solved. Agricultural policy in the 15 countries is quite harmful, as well as being superfluous. All the 15 countries are so rich that we could easily provide the necessary subsidies ourselves. The same applies to structural fund policy and, as the Swedish Prime Minister recently said, it is in fact meaningless for highly taxed countries to deduct tax from the ordinary man in the street when there are countries that will not tax their citizens, even the richest of them, and that subsequently redistribute these funds via the EU. For each euro we send to the EU, we therefore receive, on average, 80% of it back. That is of course a completely absurd policy, and one we can completely revise. We could fulfil all of the EU’s tasks with 10% of the budget, whereupon we should only have 10% of the fraud we see today."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples