Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-10-26-Speech-3-163"
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"en.20051026.17.3-163"2
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"Thank you for your outstanding speech to us in June, Mr Blair. If you offer the whole of the British rebate, you will not get a budget compromise by December. There will be no feather in your cap from the old Brussels centralists and champions of agricultural subsidies. For them, you are too modern. For us, you are not modern enough.
What we miss hearing is a declaration on your part that the Constitution is dead and buried and a statement calling on us to start afresh and to allow supporters and opponents of the Constitution to draw up a common discussion paper. We should then directly elect a new Convention which would draw up either one or two proposals which would then be voted on in referenda in all the countries simultaneously. In that way, the voters would decide our common future, and we should obtain that distribution of power between Member States and the EU that the voters want to see. You could then use your last months as EU President to guarantee transparency in Council meetings and to ensure that elected representatives have access, upon demand, to all the documents from the 300 secret working parties in the Council of Ministers which adopt 85% of all legislation behind closed doors. You could also compel the Commission to publish the names of the members of the 3 000 secret working parties that prepare our laws. Give the elected representatives some insight into the laws and into the work that goes on.
Two hundred out of a possible 220 members of the European Convention endorsed making everything open unless it was closed, in contrast to the present situation in which everything is closed unless it is opened up. All the elected representatives put their names to this, as did 23 out of 28 governments, but not Great Britain’s, even though Peter Hain would have liked to have appended his signature. He was unable to do so on behalf of Mr Blair’s Foreign Ministry. As EU President, Mr Blair can cut straight to the chase. Only a simple majority is required to change the Rules of Procedure in the Council so that, in the future, everything is open unless a qualified majority decides on an exemption. It is a very simple proposal, signed by 20 of the present 25 countries. Have you the will to put the proposal to the vote?"@en1
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