Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-14-Speech-2-165"
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".
Commissioner, Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, it is now my turn to thank all those involved in the budget on which we shall be voting in two days’ time: Mrs Jensen, Mr Garriga, Mr Böge and also all those who have been working with us.
In conclusion, I should like simply to say that this budget will certainly be implemented without any great problem in 2005, but that it is a transitional budget, which does not provide any real means of ensuring continuity and this is what is worrying us greatly. Nonetheless, I think that Mr Pittella will be able to take up the gauntlet even though this method cannot last and might hinder us in the future from achieving budgets to match our political projects.
Once again, I wish to express how baffled I am at the method used for producing the budget and especially, for this second reading, at the manner in which our dialogue was held with the Council during November.
It is true that we have reached an agreement and achieved results, but did it really need twelve hours to arrive at what should have been achievable by means of real methods of dialogue rather than a set of people who did real damage to the content of the budget? We have now reached payment appropriations of 1.05% of GDP, which is above the milestone of 1%. In return, however, we have obtained an unhoped-for result for the flexibility instrument that will allow us to finance our priorities in the short term thanks to an agreement on Heading 2. We actually feel that obtaining this result was extremely important, albeit highly unsatisfactory in the long run.
At a time when we are negotiating the next financial perspectives, we think that this method will not allow us a real budget for real European policies and the Council’s reticence during these negotiations leads me to believe that, if we speak of a ceiling in the negotiations, Parliament should also provide for the concept of a floor beneath which a European budget makes no sense.
Setting payment appropriations in stone while moving away from commitment appropriations is a usual strategy of the Council, but this is a strange course of action at a time when everyone – whether in the private sector or the public sector – is being asked to ensure transparency, reliability and truth when reading the budget figures. This cannot continue and the Union must be as strict with itself as it is with others. This situation enabled us to release the investments that we wanted in the very short term and my colleagues will speak to you about this.
We also hope – and I am addressing the Commission at this point – that we shall see very good budget implementation this year, especially in the field of information and communication with the citizens.
Like you, Commissioner, I hope that this year we shall make progress on the problem of setting up and implementing pilot projects, so that we are better able to meet our society’s expectations.
Finally, I am going to take a few minutes to say that one budget heading perplexed us. I turn this time towards my colleagues to say that, when we agreed to vote for the package on special events, we were entirely in agreement that the concept of European secularism should be fully implemented. You gave us your word that World Youth Day in Cologne is to be characterised by respect for other cultures and philosophies and that European money is to be used in an entirely secular way; you know, as I do, that we shall be watching carefully.
The adoption of the other institutions’ budgets, which took place without any problems, leads me simply to say that we must review our expenditure here because, by imposing severe restrictions on our expenditure, we have ended up imposing limitations on ourselves and denied ourselves resources for working and exercising our power and our privileges with respect to the other institutions."@en1
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