Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-07-21-Speech-3-056"
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"en.20040721.2.3-056"2
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"Mr President, on behalf of the Dutch and European Social Democrats, I warmly welcome the Netherlands Presidency in the European Parliament. Your European Affairs Minister has asked us, above all, to lead the political debate. As European Socialists, we gladly take on this challenge. You spoke about modernisation, competition with the US and Asia, and about achieving the Lisbon objectives. We Socialists fear that, with those enticing words, you intend to do something quite different in fact, namely to press Europe into the conservative corner. While a few years ago, enormous efforts were being made to combat unemployment by reducing working hours and introducing job sharing, there is now all of a sudden talk of extending the working hours and you mention shorter holidays. What is so modern about that? Whereas we used to concern ourselves with job quality, care for the workplace, the prevention of illnesses and accidents at the workplace with a European-wide regulation, you now talk about deregulation. Have, along with this, the objectives of higher labour participation and lower absenteeism through illness disappeared? We used to talk about more flexibility within the labour market with greater legal protection; you are now talking about deregulating that protection. It therefore seems that your objective of abolishing the administrative burden is more of an excuse for abolishing certain social and administrative achievements. At the same time, you fail to address the European tendering rules that are throttling the small and medium-size companies. Whereas we used to talk about investing 3% of the GDP per Member State in research and education, areas where, incidentally, the Netherlands has so far been lagging behind badly, you now only talk about the Stability Pact, economising and holding firm to the deficit of 3% maximum, without making resources and scope available for holding just as firm to 3% investment in research and education. This is something I would have liked to have seen fought out before the Court of Justice. In all fairness, the Kok report on ‘work, work, work’ would take this really seriously. Whereas in 2000, we used to talk about high-quality public provisions not only in infrastructure, you now talk about liberalising and privatising the service sector, which involves electricity, health care and public transport. Are you actually prepared to stop those disastrous proposals by Mr Bolkestein to liberalise the services? After all, they would enable Poles to offer their services in the Netherlands at Polish prices without being subject to prices current in our country, and this would, in fact, lead to social dumping. To the Social Democrats, it appears that the Lisbon agenda is being used to your advantage to adopt a hard conservative economic agenda, under the guise of modernisation. In our opinion, you are turning back the clock and refusing to create jobs that require brains and to commit to quality, research, education and high-quality public services. We fear that, as a result, unemployment will increase in Europe, that the weaker members of society will pick up the tab of the cost-cutting measures and that you, with your candidate Mr Barroso, are not going about things the right way if we want to win the fight against Asia and the US. We are throwing down the gauntlet before the debate. Although we warmly welcome you and your Presidency, we are still struggling to accept your political choices, and we are looking forward to the debate under your Presidency."@en1
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