Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-14-Speech-2-027"
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"en.20041214.5.2-027"2
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"Mr President, we are all taxpayers, and we all pay subscriptions to the EU. We are also all citizens with different views of the Constitution. According to both the EC Treaty and the Constitution, we are all equal before the law. Nonetheless, all the EU bodies now propose that we who are opposed to the Constitution should pay subsidies to those who are in favour of it. There are major hearings to which no opponents of the Constitution are invited. There are major subsidies to the European movement and to think-tanks that think alike, and now millions of euros for propaganda. It is undemocratic, improper, in conflict with the principle of equality and, therefore, illegal. I do not understand how the Commission’s clever Swedish Vice-President can put her name to a communications strategy that will impose a particular view of the Constitution upon people.
The public authorities have just one task: to publish the draft Constitution and the alternative produced by the Convention, preferably in reader-friendly editions for every possible target group. Opinions should be left to a free press, the political organisations and parties, citizens’ initiatives and interested parties. States should not have opinions, and constitutions should have no specific political content. A state is a tool for all the citizens. A constitution should merely create ground rules for bringing the laws into being. It is up to the people to decide the political complexion of the laws, whether they are to be adopted in Brussels or by the national parliaments and whether they are good or bad. It is totalitarian to want to give the state a specific opinion and lock people into a specific policy. Mrs Wallström can scarcely sell that project to the electorate. She would do much better to stick to her own proposal, which is much more reminiscent of Grundtvig’s message of ‘freedom for Loki as well as for Thor’."@en1
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