Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-14-Speech-2-169"
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"en.20041214.12.2-169"2
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".
Mr President, in EU countries about one fortieth of tax revenue is spent by EU institutions. In Britain, we are told that this is a small price to pay for the privilege of trading with our neighbours and for the prosperity the EU has brought us. However, we are beginning to recognise, as kindly confirmed by ex-Commissioner Kinnock, that we do not need to be in the EU to trade and cooperate with EU countries and that our prosperity might well be higher if we were not in the EU.
They also tell us that the EU budget is small in comparison with national budgets. However, national budgets pay for some useful things, such as defence, education, health care and pensions. The EU budget pays for subsidies to agriculture – subsidies that agriculture would function better without. It pays for regional projects that would otherwise not have been considered worthwhile. It pays for poorly targeted overseas development aid. It pays for auditors to find out that 93% of reported spending was unsafe or riddled with errors. It pays for this Parliament.
Let us stop arguing about how much should be spent on this or that project or initiative in vain pursuit of the Lisbon Agenda. Let us look at the broader picture. As the last speaker has just said, several countries with their own budget problems want a limit of one per cent of GNI. The Commission rightly points out that it must be much larger if the expectations of the new accession countries are to be fulfilled. How much larger – two per cent, four per cent? If the EU were genuinely concentrating on the ideals it keeps proclaiming – peace, prosperity, strong economies – it would be acting very differently. It would not be looking at these various projects: it would be opening its markets properly, internally and externally; it would cease killing off our businesses with thousands of ill-judged prescriptive rules, and its budget could be a small fraction of one per cent of GDP."@en1
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