Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-03-09-Speech-3-017"
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"en.20050309.3.3-017"2
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"Mr President, in March 2000 the Heads of State or Government of the Union, as well as the Commission, wanted to prove that social action was possible via liberal means. Their decisive objective of moving towards full employment by 2010 gave rise, here and there, to real hopes.
Five years later, the situation is a cruel disappointment. Unemployment remains, on average, about 9% in Europe, where lack of job security is increasing rapidly. In the Union’s premier economy, that of Germany, which holds the absolute record for exports, unemployment has nevertheless exceeded the five-million mark. In order to achieve the Lisbon objective, that is to say a 70% employment rate by 2010, it would be necessary to create 22 million more jobs than the present rate over the next five years. This is hard to imagine at a time when the European Central Bank has just revised its growth forecast for the euro zone, reducing it to 1.6% for this year, and when countries such as Italy and the Netherlands are on the verge of recession.
However, things are not going badly for everybody.
observes that there has been an explosion in the profits of the big companies. Their share in the GDP of Europe and of Asia, as the British journal points out, has achieved a level which is without precedent in the last 25 years. The workers, it explains, are the major losers. Yet who is talking about the workers here?
For its part, the organisation ATD Fourth World regrets the fact that nowhere in its communication of 2 February does the Commission mention the objective of eliminating poverty, which currently affects 68 million people in the Union. Do you not think that such a radical separation between the objectives announced yesterday and the results obtained today justifies our asking some serious questions about the relevance of the liberal dogmas which have served, from the start, as the basis for the Lisbon process?
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Yet what are the messages from Brussels which our fellow citizens are hearing day after day? Mrs Danuta Hübner, Commissioner for Regional Policy, wants to facilitate delocalisations in Europe. For Mr Špidla, Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs, our objective is, above all, flexibility. The Vice-President responsible for industry, Mr Verheugen, hits the nail on the head in the French press, when he says that, with the Lisbon strategy, there were so many priorities that there were none, and that this time we want an action plan which is specific and which concentrates on competitiveness.
For her part, Mrs Nellie Kroes, Commissioner for Competition, has declared that she wants to do away with State aids of a regional nature in the 15 older Member States of the Union. As for Mr Mandelson, Commissioner for Trade, he has reminded Member States of their duty to continue to reform their labour markets and their welfare systems.
Finally, Mr McCreevy, the Commissioner responsible for the internal market, deserves special mention. He brought to an end the long-running saga on the withdrawal, revision or retention of the Bolkestein Directive, explaining that there is no question of withdrawing this text, despite the fact that it had been rejected on all sides. He immediately followed that by refusing, in collaboration with the Council, to re-examine the directive on software patenting, despite the fact that this had been unanimously demanded by the parliamentary groups. Finally, at the European Policy Forum in London, he revealed his true opinion, with Anglo-Saxon bluntness, by saying, and I quote Mr McCreevy
‘We should remember that the internal market programme is by far the greatest deregulatory exercise in recent history.’
This is what Mr Barroso calls ‘a new focus on growth and jobs’. Do you not sense, therefore, that people feel that they are moving irresistibly closer to the liberalism-overdose threshold, and that the rejection of this model will, sooner or later, return like a boomerang to rebound on the Union’s governing bodies in one form or another? My group is campaigning precisely in order to help this opinion to be expressed, not against Europe – and there is a danger of that happening – but in favour of its profound transformation. That is why we obviously cannot give our backing to the compromise resolution which has been tabled today, and that is why we have submitted an alternative version."@en1
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