Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-12-13-Speech-2-028"
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"en.20051213.6.2-028"2
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".
Mr President, I am speaking on behalf of the Union for Europe of the Nations Group.
Our group will vote in favour of the agreement reached by the Council and Parliament on the 2006 budget, even though it is far from satisfactory. We find it hard to accept that the level of payments has been set at 1.01% of GNI. The compromise that has been reached on this issue is in fact nothing less than a capitulation to the Council. The latter cuts the EU’s spending with a tenacity worthy of a better cause, in so doing violating the principles of solidarity and cohesion in order to further the local interests of the net payers into the EU budget. The concessions granted by the Council on the flexibility instrument and on programmes adopted under the codecision procedure do not compensate in any way for this propensity to make cuts.
We have been disappointed by Commissioner Grybauskaitė’s position. During the conciliation procedure, she did not even remain faithful to the Commission’s previous stance on the budget level. This latter is now worryingly close to 1%, or in other words the symbolic, and indeed real, threshold below which achievement of the EU’s basic goals cannot be safeguarded. This is all the more alarming because the 2006 budget may become a point of reference for the 2007-2013 Financial Perspective, which has been extremely difficult in the making. The risk that this may happen increases the likelihood that negotiations on the Financial Perspective will end in fiasco, which would mean the 2006 budget serving as a basis for future annual budgets. The solidarity and cohesion policies could therefore suffer as a result of the Council’s position for many years to come. We must ask ourselves whether this is the kind of EU that we want.
Ladies and gentlemen, the most inadequate of all the proposals tabled has been adopted. We must realise that a small budget cannot be a good budget. I agree that a large budget may not necessarily be a good budget, but it is impossible for a small budget to be a good one. This House has heard comments along the lines of, ‘the budget before us is small but good’. There is no consensus that this is the case, however, just as there is no consensus on a budget that will ignore the needs of countries, especially the new Member States. Solidarity is a basic concern for these latter.
Ladies and gentlemen, there are certain incidents that cause many EU citizens to lose their enthusiasm for Community policies, and their belief in the momentous idea which is the European Union. An example of one such incident is the position recently adopted by Mr Schröder, the former German chancellor, on the construction of the gas pipeline along the bottom of the Baltic Sea. There is much controversy about this pipeline in many of the new EU Member States, and it has received a lot of negative publicity in these countries. Indeed, it is not only in the new Member States that the publicity has been negative, for I have before me a list of German newspapers that have been extremely critical of the former chancellor’s decisions. If the intention is now to tell the new EU Member States that there will not be enough money for them to achieve their fundamental goals, even though the aim of these goals is to promote what could be termed a natural impulse of the European Community, and if such incidents, which ruin the reputation of leading EU politicians, are accompanied by cuts to funding for the new EU Member States, we must realise that this impulse of the European Community, which also goes by the name of solidarity, will be weakened rather than strengthened.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a poor budget. I say this not only because it is small. As I said before, it is a poor budget because it has implications for the future, and because it will destroy the natural inclination and impulse of the European Community, which should be the first concern of every one of us."@en1
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