Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-22-Speech-3-182"
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"en.20050622.20.3-182"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the President-in-Office of the Council, Mr Juncker, said in his speech this morning that he had brought two principles to the attention of his colleagues at last week’s summit.
The first of these was that they should revisit their own decisions and ensure that these decisions are implemented. The second was that they should abide by the institutional rules. It is a sad state of affairs when the members of a community must be reminded of such self-evident rules of conduct, and when appeals must be made to those in positions of responsibility to abide by them. Unfortunately, the appeals fell on deaf ears in the case of too many Heads of State or Government. For many years now, the euro zone finance ministers have also ignored these principles, even though they are necessary for formulating efficient, confidence-building and professional policies. Those who infringed the Stability and Growth Pact have even set themselves up in judgment and prevented the Commission from enforcing the rights conferred upon it. The same happened to Parliament when it considered the two draft Commission regulations on the Stability and Growth Pact.
The Commission called on the finance ministers to incorporate Parliament’s proposals; the President-in-Office of the Council called on his colleagues to take heed of them. During the last part-session, a majority of Members of this House voted in favour of both my reports on the two Commission regulations. Yet, even though the majority of finance ministers, the Commission and the President-in-Office of the Council agreed on the substance of our new amendments, not one of them was accepted by the Council. Most of the national delegations would have been prepared to incorporate certain amendments, in particular those relating to total debt evolution and monitoring, but a small number of influential countries stood in the way of this happening. Attempts are now being made to pass the buck to Parliament, by telling us that although no one is going to ask us what we want, we have no power to stop anything from happening. This is not a matter of institutional competence; it is a matter of substance. In its statement on the ECOFIN decision, the Commission said that in its opinion, the draft regulation would have been further strengthened had some of Parliament’s amendments been incorporated, in particular those relating to debt monitoring. This is a sign that Parliament is heading in the right direction, and the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs has therefore decided to resubmit the amendments adopted at first reading. Our reasons for this are as follows; we are convinced that the substance of these amendments is appropriate, and we do not want the other EU institutions to disregard institutional rights and opinions on matters of substance.
What do we want? We want a comparison between the data supplied by the Member States to the ECB and that supplied to Eurostat. The Council has stated that comparisons of this kind are already being carried out, but this begs the question of why no one noticed the discrepancies in the figures reported by Greece.
Secondly, we want the medium-term budgetary objectives to be reviewed, and not ‘at least every four years’, as the Council has now proposed, but on a regular basis, as per our original proposals. We want public debt monitoring, of which there is no mention in the regulation, even though the Council agreed to it in March. We want stability programmes to be submitted annually for a two-year period; yet again, this proposal was rejected. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this is not in fact a dispute over points of substance; the simple truth of the matter is that the Council did not wish to accept any of Parliament’s amendments. An attitude of this kind hardly inspires confidence, and it is not only unwarranted from a factual point of view, but also unfair in institutional terms. I would therefore ask the House to vote tomorrow at second reading in the same way it did at first reading."@en1
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