Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-07-Speech-2-187"
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"en.20050607.25.2-187"2
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"Mr President, we now again face proposals to increase EU expenditure and, thus, income. The argument is that the EU is growing and so must cost more. The EU is growing both in terms of its number of Members and due to the fact that different tasks are constantly being taken over from the Member States. Is this a sensible development? The obvious answer is no.
The European countries that fulfil the membership requirements must of course be welcomed. There are, however, neither rational reasons nor popular support for moving further political tasks from the Member States to Brussels. On the contrary, the principle of subsidiarity, to which general homage is paid but which is never respected, requires a great many powers to be moved back from the EU institutions to the national parliaments. The fact that this is the will of our peoples is evident from the referenda in France and the Netherlands and from what we know about public opinion in many other Member States.
Right now, we are seeing the end of an era in the EU’s history, the end of the era in which the political elite could move further ahead with its ambitions and plans without concerning itself with the will of the people. That this was previously possible has to do with the fact that the structure of the parties in Western Europe reflects the issues of political controversy in the 20th century, arranged on a scale from right to left. With few exceptions, the established parties are entirely in favour of a continuous shift of political power from the parliaments of the Member States to Brussels. Thus, people cannot, in general elections to their parliaments, state that they are opposed to this development. In referenda on EU issues and sometimes in elections to the European Parliament, the opportunity arises for the peoples of Europe explicitly to adopt positions on the role the EU should play. They then take the opportunity to say no to the shift in power.
It is important for us to bear this in mind now that we are debating the EU budget for 2007-2013. There is no popular support for increased expenditure in an EU in which just over 70% of the budget goes on agricultural policy and the regional funds. We register a reservation against the temporary committee’s proposal for the financial perspectives, amounting to 1.07% of gross domestic income in payment appropriations and 1.18% in commitments. We believe that, in accordance with the G6 countries’ proposal, the total payment appropriations should fall within one per cent of the EU countries’ total gross domestic income."@en1
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