Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-09-Speech-4-137"
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"en.20050609.26.4-137"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for giving me the chance to state my opinion on the draft report on social inclusion in the new EU Member States. I would like to begin by thanking the rapporteur for his work and congratulating him on having made a distinction in the report between social inclusion and egalitarianism or corporatism.
When creating special conditions for certain social groups, we must never lose sight of the fact that all citizens must be considered equal. Positive discrimination is as worthy of condemnation as negative discrimination. It is a fact that certain social groups have more or fewer differences or problems. I fully support solidarity with these groups. I am convinced that the best way to achieve their social inclusion is to create equal conditions for all of them. Administrative exclusion and preferential treatment for individual groups is not a path towards social inclusion, but towards continued social exclusion.
If we take into account the number of disadvantaged groups mentioned, and rightly so, in the report – or in other words women, single parents, people entering the job market, older people, the poor, those suffering ill health, disabled persons, carers, disadvantaged children, children under threat due to a lack of parental authority, linguistic minorities, refugees, immigrants, Roma, other ethnic minorities, the homeless, alcoholics and drug addicts – it would not be much of an exaggeration to conclude that ordinary, non-disadvantaged citizens are a threatened minority in society.
I do not believe that we will need to set up support programmes for those who have not succeeded in being included in a single threatened group. The report under discussion aims to fight exclusion, and I believe that – paradoxically – we have excluded 10 countries from the 25 Member States, all of which have equal rights, because they joined the European Union several years later. I firmly believe that, next time, the European Union will also tackle this type of exclusion, and that the next report on social inclusion will evaluate the situation in all the EU Member States.
The draft report refers to the draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. I am aware that the rapporteur wrote his report at a time when it was not yet obvious that the Constitution had been killed off. Since the people of France and the Netherlands rejected the draft Constitution for Europe, these references are groundless and should be deleted from the report. I thank the rapporteur for his good work, which is of benefit for the European Union and for my country."@en1
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