Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-07-06-Speech-3-070"
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"en.20050706.3.3-070"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, as chairman of my group, I have made the quite deliberate decision to take the floor at the end of this debate, and I am rather disappointed to note that I am the only group chairman to speak on this subject at all. It is in fact an issue on which the leaders of groups simply have to give their backing to those in their ranks who are working to combat poverty.
To those Members of this House who are always – and not just because of the British Council Presidency’s initiative – working on this topic, I want to make it clear that the Socialist Group in this House regards the fight against poverty, both in Africa and in the world at large, as a key part of the work it does.
I want to devote one moment in my speaking time to an unknown person – to the mother and her dead child. In the small town of which I was mayor, there were plenty of people, women in particular, who had lost children during the war. When I was a guest at anniversary celebrations, the worst thing I would have to hear was women of the war generation talking about was the loss of a loved child, a wound that is always fresh.
If we look at Africa we see innumerable mothers – uncounted day by day – sitting in front of their dead children, uncomprehending, grieving and deserted, an image I wish we could all impress upon our minds, for nothing, surely, can encourage and oblige us more to take more seriously the fight against poverty that the British Presidency of the Council has set itself as a priority for action than that small sense of common humanity that tells us that we may not leave a woman who has lost her child alone in the world if we claim to want to make that world a more humane place.
It is before that image that we Socialists bow our heads in the knowledge that this initiative is the very least we can do, and I have a practical proposal to make, to help these women, along with many, many others who need our solidarity, by doing one small thing. If the big multinational and global companies put 0.25 % – one quarter of one-hundredth – of their fees for currency transactions, into a fund for Africa, and if we in this House put 0.25 % of what we spend on our international currency transactions in the Budget and pay it into a fund for aid in Africa, we will end up with a large amount that the business world, along, for example, with us in this House can put to good use in the European Union, as a very practical contribution to the fight against poverty, one that may well involve a contribution by each individual. We could perhaps discuss the possibility of taking action of this kind."@en1
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