Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-09-15-Speech-3-112"
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"en.20040915.6.3-112"2
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"Ladies and gentlemen, rather than producing stability and growth in Europe, the Stability Pact has resulted in the opposite. Growth rates in most European countries are lower today than in previous years, and what has increased has been poverty, unemployment, McJobs and bankruptcies of small and medium-sized enterprises.
Do you seriously want to tell Europeans that this is what stability means? Nobody wants inflation, yet price stability bought at the cost of employment and quality of life benefits only Europe’s rich, and harms the vast majority of Europeans.
It is unfortunate that the Commission’s proposals on reform of the Stability Pact do not indicate a change in thinking, but are simply cosmetic corrections aimed at reviving an obsolete concept.
It is obvious that critics who accuse the Commission’s proposals of watering down the Pact have simply not realised that the Stability Pact in its original version is beyond saving. After all, there are now six European countries which have been so successful in cutting back that they are now experiencing a crisis, and it is as a result of this, rather than of expansionist spending policies, that they are no longer in a position to comply with the ‘stability’ criteria.
Use of the Pact as a cudgel to push through cuts in social services and privatisation policies demands that it be more flexibly applied, and this is why we of the Confederal Group of the United European Left/Nordic Green Left reject the Commission’s proposals as well as the spirit and letter of the Pact itself. Anyone who has a genuine desire for stability and growth in Europe must abandon neo-liberal dogmas.
Budgetary consolidation cannot be an end in itself. Public investments secure the future and employment. The internal market requires mass purchasing power if it is to thrive, and this cannot be achieved without renewed increases in wages and social spending.
While we are on the subject of deficits, if large European companies were finally forced to pay up by means of a high-level EU-wide harmonisation of corporation tax, and if a new Constitution committed Europe to disarmament, not rearmament, a much more effective step would be taken towards the prevention of escalating government debts than through any aggressive programmes of cuts which only serve to aggravate problems.
We would unreservedly support a Stability Pact for Europe which was genuinely worthy of the name and which committed the Member States to reducing poverty and unemployment instead of to indiscriminate deficit goals, with sanctions imposed on countries that failed to meet them. We are, however, firmly opposed to life-prolonging measures for an instrument which is designed to destroy the European social model."@en1
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