Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-12-Speech-3-047"
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"en.20050112.3.3-047"2
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".
Mr President, I can take one of two approaches; I can either answer the 30 Members who have spoken, and risk being very long-winded, or I can merely answer a few of them, and risk appearing extremely impolite to the others. I shall therefore try to be brief in order to be polite.
Several of you stated that your groups would support the Stability Pact, and this made the debate extremely interesting. I shall explain what I mean by this. Mr Goebbels, no less, offered the support of his parliamentary group, the Socialists. If I understood him correctly, Mr Cohn-Bendit appears to be moving towards a clear meeting of interests and ideas on this issue. Mr Poettering promised the support of the Group of the European People’s Party. Five minutes of the Luxembourg Presidency were therefore all that were needed to see the Socialists, the Liberals, the Christian Democrats and all the others agree on the general shape to be taken by the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact. This is something I welcome greatly, and in this respect the Luxembourg Presidency will be straightforward; this was not something I was aware of before today’s sitting.
I shall turn briefly to the Directive on the liberalisation of services, with regard to which I thought I had made my views clear. We will not reject this Directive, as it could in fact generate jobs if we draft it in a way that is appropriate to the situation. I would like us, however, to join forces to remove everything from this Directive which poses a risk of social dumping, and which has crept into the text if one reads between the lines. I am well aware that our discussion of this directive is bedevilled by confusion, because the potential risks posed by a number of its provisions are not obvious. I should therefore like to call on the Commission, the Council and Parliament to examine this draft directive line by line, searching for any risk of social dumping. After all, given that everyone, including Mr Bolkestein, tells me that the aim is not to violate the rules which protect our labour markets, we should be able to eliminate the risk of social dumping – a risk I believe to be very much present as far as this directive is concerned – by means of a common reading, if this is indeed our overall intention. That said, even if we had the opportunity to do so, the directive would not be adopted as it stands during the Luxembourg Presidency, as it requires amendment in several places.
The Statute for Members will be adopted before the end of the Luxembourg Presidency.
Mr Mote, you said that you would like to leave the European Union because it represents everything to which you are opposed and which you reject. I must say that I cannot agree with you on this point. The European Union represents everything I support, because I support understanding between peoples and European solidarity – a solidarity that must not be jeopardised by a flawed reform of the Financial Perspective that aims to destroy solidarity instruments. The European Union represents everything I support because I support peace. We have undergone untold suffering in Europe as a result of divisions between peoples. Even if you wish to leave the European Union, you cannot fail to support it.
Mr Goebbels, who has been following my progress closely for many years, believes me to be entirely incapable of such a thing, and on this point we agree.
Mr President, several speakers have referred to the Lisbon agenda, in particular the group chairmen and other Members such as Mr Swoboda and Mrs Oomen. It would appear that we are more or less in agreement on the need to maintain the fundamental synergy on which the Lisbon strategy is based, and which was given a useful boost by the conclusions of the Gothenburg European Council.
It has become a habit of Mr Cohn-Bendit’s to refer indiscriminately to authors from both sides of the Rhine, and today he quoted Victor Hugo. With regard to the Lisbon agenda, I should like to quote Pascal, who said that he liked things that go hand in hand. This holds true for a number of areas of life, and it also holds true for the Lisbon strategy. It is impossible to distinguish between the various elements that go towards making the Lisbon strategy so effective – and I am talking here of its theoretical effectiveness, not the enthusiasm with which it is implemented.
A number of you have referred to the much-needed structural reforms that must be carried out in the framework of the Lisbon strategy. I have been a member of the Ecofin Council since 1989, I believe. Since then, I have been told week after week and month after month that structural reforms must be carried out, yet it is rare for me to come across anyone who is able to say exactly what these structural reforms should look like. As a general rule, it is my impression that those who say that structural reforms must be carried out actually mean that the social state must be dismantled.
This is why it is frequently said with regard to structural reforms that labour markets must be reformed and that they need to be more flexible. I believe this to be true, but I also believe that European employers could be more flexible. I believe that it would be in the interests of decision-makers, who frequently also take decisions for others, to prove themselves more flexible in adapting the tools we have to modern needs.
I myself do not believe that Europeans should be led to think that it will be enough to reform labour markets, to abolish existing social legislation and to eliminate the buffer zones provided by workers’ rights in order to become more competitive. This would be a very short-term approach, with obvious consequences; we would not gain competitiveness, but we would lose the support of a large number of Europeans, in particular workers. I should therefore like to warn you against such simplistic proposals, which will get us nowhere."@en1
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