Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-14-Speech-2-013"
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"en.20041214.5.2-013"2
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".
Mr President, Mr President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, we are rolling our sleeves up. The difficult and sometimes dramatic weeks involved in confirming the Commission are behind us. It eventually got a resounding vote of confidence, and our Group voted for it with a large degree of unanimity. Now is the time to get down to work. Today’s debate is a quite new experience, and what makes it so is the fact that the Commission first listens to Parliament. Mr President of the Commission, I am very glad to hear you say that you wanted to hear what Parliament thinks about the work the Commission will be doing over the next five years. I am also glad to hear you say that you will be presenting your programme on 26 January and, in so doing, want to take into consideration as much as possible of what Parliament has to say. Even as I speak, we are endeavouring to put together this House’s common position.
Our Group has tabled a motion for a resolution, which is currently being discussed with the other Groups. I hope that the House will be able to express an opinion, thus enabling the Commission and – it is to be hoped – the Council, to agree on a five-year programme. Our group believes that there are five main priorities: if we were able to implement them alone, we would do so, but we cannot, and that is why we always need to be willing to compromise. The first is economic reforms in the European Union to make for greater competitiveness and more prosperity for the public; the second is to improve security by combating terrorism and crime, securing the European Union’s external borders, preventing abuse of the asylum systems and fighting illegal immigration. I might add that this is something that matters also to people who enter the EU illegally, for what is going on in the Mediterranean, with thousands of people dying because the situation there remains unresolved, is a fundamental violation of human rights. We must join together in attempting to find solutions so that people no longer end up losing their lives in the Mediterranean.
The third priority is a stronger Europe in a safer world, creating greater stability and fostering democracy and human rights. Fourthly, there is a need to shape a policy that makes a clean environment possible and offers people a better quality of life. The fifth and final priority is to make the European Union more open, more receptive to new ideas and more democratic, to enable it to work better and with less red tape. What I ask of you, Mr President of the Commission, is that, whenever putting forward a proposal, you should ask yourself whether it makes for more bureaucracy, whether it contravenes the principle of subsidiarity, and how much it costs. What I ask, in other words, is that all these things should be taken into account in the Commission’s administrative practice as early as the stage at which proposals are presented.
There are three aspects on which I would like to focus rather more closely. It is Europe’s competitiveness that determines whether people in the European Union have work and the wherewithal to live. Our main concern must be to maintain and create jobs, and we can do that only if we make Europe more competitive. I would urge you, Mr President of the Commission, to be cautious in the language you use, for the language used in the Lisbon Declaration, according to which the European Union was to become the most dynamic knowledge-based economic area in the world, reminds me of Nikita Khrushchev, who, in the 1950s and 1960s, wanted to overtake the USA, and we know what became of that! So let us be modest in what we say, but ambitious in what we do. If you do that, you will be on the right track.
By far the greater part of our Group takes the view that we must not jeopardise the stability criteria that underpin the Stability and Growth Pact, for new debts will have to be repaid tomorrow by those who are the young generation of today, something that would neither make economic sense nor be in line with the policy’s moral foundations.
Something else that is important is the neighbourhood policy. I would like to encourage you to have us, during your presidency, taking initiatives in the Middle East, seeing as we do that the Americans cannot manage on their own. The Middle East is a region that is one of the European Union’s neighbours, and it is worthy of every effort on our part to establish stability and peace in it for both Israel and Palestine. We know how important all this is to peace and for the sake of good relations with the Arab and Muslim world. Our priority must be the adoption of the Constitution, on which the European Union’s peaceful and democratic action in the twenty-first century depends."@en1
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