Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-01-13-Speech-2-019"
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"en.20040113.2.2-019"2
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"Mr President, on behalf of the ecologists’ group I should also like to pay tribute to the political and intellectual achievements of Mr Herzog in this assembly over many years and particularly to his work on this report. As several speakers have already said, this report, compiled on the initiative of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, is essentially designed to clarify the terms of the debate and particularly to ensure that the opening of individual sectors of the economy to competition in the European Union is accompanied by greater legal certainty and is subject to funding guarantees and an evaluation requirement. Let me say that the Greens will support the amendments that have been re-tabled in plenary in order to return to the spirit of Mr Herzog’s original proposal. I should like to add two elements to the debate. Firstly, I must remind the House that the Convention also debated this issue and concluded that there was a need for a legal basis other than the one currently provided by the treaties. Accordingly, if the European Parliament, in tomorrow’s vote, were to come out against the position of the Convention, we should have an interesting conflict of political legitimacy between the two bodies.
Secondly, I would add that, in the course of this debate, we ecologists have observed that there is a curious underlying alliance between the advocates of maximum subsidiarity – a precept, incidentally, that is also supported by Mr Herzog and our group – and those who believe that there must be no barriers at all to engagement in free competition. As a result of this alliance, there is basically no agreement within the European Parliament, just as there is no agreement in the Council, on the need to proceed towards framework legislation.
So I should simply like to ask the following question: when we have all delivered our speeches, who will be the winners in this debate? It clearly will not be the advocates of subsidiarity but rather the defenders of the right to engage in unbridled competition. The fact is that, month after month, we vote on sectoral directives, and we can see how difficult the Court of Justice finds it to justify the imposition of any obligation to provide services in the public interest. The result is the reinforcement of a European model which is largely based on tax, wage and welfare competition between locations. If we want to redress this imbalance to some extent, we really need greater legal certainty in order to guarantee the funding of services of general interest, however they may be defined by the Member States.
For this reason I call on each of you to reflect on this dubious alliance between those who aspire to define services of general interest in their own countries and regions and those who swear by completely free competition with no holds barred. We agree with the former but urge them to dissolve their alliance with the latter."@en1
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