Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-04-20-Speech-2-421"
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"en.20040420.18.2-421"2
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"Mr President, what I would like to say to Mrs Theato, as she not only ceases to be a Chairman but also leaves the House, is that I have to admit that it was only during the second half of our time here together that I learned to appreciate her. That is, however, better than if the halves had been the other way around.
Now for the second comment I would like to make. We are currently witnessing an attempt at misusing budgetary control and its competences in the service of a political campaign against the Community institutions, in this instance, and not for the first time, the Commission. That accusation I level not at my good friend Mr Heaton-Harris, nor at Mr Sjöstedt, nor even at Mr Bonde or Mr Callanan, who has delivered himself of what I regard as a rather surprising statement on behalf of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy.
The crucial question, though, is whether the rest of the House is so blind as to join in. The question is not directed at those who campaign against the Community institutions, but at those who constitute the majority in this House, and I think we have to ask ourselves the critical question as to whether there are tendencies within us who sit on the Committee on Budgetary Control, in the way we work, that, inadvertently, give some people a pretext for what they are currently getting up to. Let me give you a few examples of what I mean.
At the same time as the anti-integrationist groups and minorities within the major groups have discovered the Committee on Budgetary Control as an instrument and a platform for their purposes, and started to work in it accordingly, some groups – and certain national delegations in particular – think that working in it is beneath them. That is the primary reason why certain political forces are able to put the Committee on Budgetary Control to their own uses.
Secondly, I have a substantial disagreement with Mr Mulder on the issue of political responsibility. What we need, I think, in this House is a bit more intercultural competence, which would prevent us from attempting to make our own national conceptions – in this instance, our conceptions of what political responsibility is – into general benchmarks for 15 – soon to be 25 – Member States, without having in any way examined whether the administrative and decision-making structures that we have are at all appropriate to them. That is something we have to examine before we do anything else.
Let me now turn to the committee, and to a few other behavioural traits to be found in it, which I find annoying, to put it mildly. If you are a Member of the Committee, you do not have to lend credibility to this or that rumour purveyed by the
or some other source by rejoicing at the opportunity to get a couple of two-line mentions in the press, then adopting a worried frown and expressing your grave concern at the fact that such rumours are going around. If you do that, then you are, for a start, making the rumour credible to some degree. Before you do so, you should investigate whether certain rumours are backed up by objective facts. You do not have to jump at every tempting morsel held out by opponents of integration or by certain elements in the media.
My next point is that we have a tendency to present ourselves as whiter than white and, above all, as whiter than the others. There is a perilous competition here between some Members of the same nationality but belonging to different political groups. I hope you will not mind, Mr President, if I give an example. When I was a rapporteur myself, I once had two Members of a particular group sitting in my office, and they said to me, 'Mr Kuhne, you have drafted a wonderful report, to which we do not need to table any amendments, but we can not vote for it because we can not allow the people back home to think we are less keen on reform than the others.' That is another way in which the credibility of European institutions can be damaged, and from that we can all learn something."@en1
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