Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-10-Speech-3-297"

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"Mr President, Commissioner, you have just heard that the rapporteur, Mr Olle Schmidt from the Group of the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party, and I are not going to give up. In the run-up to the elections, we face opposition from populists, among others, to our efforts to get this House to say loud and clear what proposals it has to make in respect of the Commission’s proposal for VAT on services in the postal sector. It is for that reason that we have resubmitted our amendments to the Commission proposal. Simply rejecting this proposal out of hand, which is what Mr Goebbels, and others who speak for the Group of the Party of European Socialists, have been trying to do for almost a year now, is too primitive an approach. To be sure, it plays well with the public to proclaim your opposition to VAT on postage stamps, but we are well aware that, as various postal services have been liberalised, there will, in the long term, be no getting away from the need to treat postal services and private service providers equally in order to avoid competition in this sector being distorted. So it makes more sense to us to tell the Council of Ministers, and the Commission too, what we want done to prevent postage stamps going up in price. This is what our amendments are aiming at. In the first place, we want to defer the entry into force of this directive until 2007, in order to give the postal services enough time to implement it without difficulty. Apart from that, we would like to allow those Member States that have a greatly reduced VAT rate – Luxembourg has been one since January 2003; ours is 3% – to apply it to postal services too. That is a tangible and positive policy; simply saying ‘no’ or adopting some similarly populist approach does no service either to the postal service or to those who use it. I therefore hope that the majority in this House will vote to approve the sensible proposal that I, on behalf of my group, have joined with the rapporteur in bringing forward."@en1

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