Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-10-Speech-2-042"
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"en.20050510.4.2-042"2
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"Madam President, in George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, there is a scene that is repeated in which, as soon as a debate is to take place, the sheep begin to call out ‘four legs good, two legs bad’. That is what we see now. Whenever anyone objects to our transferring power from the Member States to the EU institutions, we are told that not to do so would be tantamount to re-playing the Second World War, complete with holocaust and everything else. We cannot therefore even debate the existence or otherwise of the Working Time Directive without being subject to accusations of that kind.
The principle of subsidiarity is fundamental, with tribute paid to it on solemn occasions of every conceivable kind. When we get down to the details, precisely the opposite is the case. It is actually impossible for anything to remain with the Member States. The Working Time Directive is in itself a breach of the principle of subsidiarity. Each of the Member States is different. Each has its own economic structure. Some countries make their living from manufacturing, others from the processing industry. We have different arrangements in the public sector, with different rules governing such matters. There is no good reason for trying to regulate working time for the whole of the EU in this way. Indeed, it would be extremely inappropriate. Those who now argue in favour of doing so say that the alternative is social dumping. That is a hugely serious accusation to make against those countries that we have accepted as members of the EU and which all fulfil the Copenhagen criteria and are constitutional states entitled to organise themselves as they see fit. The notion that we could obtain some form of slave labour from these countries is a grotesque accusation which definitely must be rejected.
Parliament has now attempted in this House further to exacerbate the Working Time Directive already in place. That is something we must reject, for it is an attempt to give a yet further increased presence to the EU institutions. The proposal should therefore definitely be rejected with reference to the principle of subsidiarity."@en1
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