Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-01-18-Speech-3-016"
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"en.20060118.2.3-016"2
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".
Mr President, Mr Barroso, Mr Schüssel, your Presidency is getting off to a good start, what with Parliament probably challenging the directive on the liberalisation of port services, the general outcry against the draft financial perspective at the European Council and so on. You have inherited a minefield. Good luck! Some of your predecessors saw their image go from one of triumphant self-confidence to one of pitiful weakness, all in the space of six months. You are embarking on your Presidency with more modesty, and I think you are right to do so. I will dwell only on one passage from your memorandum. When you mention the debate on the Constitution, you write in paragraph 8:
We are trying to restore a higher level of receptiveness to people’s concerns about the preservation of the European way of life in the context of globalisation. It is a matter of rebuilding trust in the Union’s political decision-makers.
There lies the rub, in fact. Yet in the current climate of the people’s disaffection with the European institutions, words are no longer enough: practical, clear and convincing acts are required. As an illustrious ancestor used to say: ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’. With this in mind, I can see no more meaningful a gesture right now than that of a clear and public call for the rejection or the definitive withdrawal of the draft Services Directive and of any other text drawing its inspiration from the same liberal principles.
Last Thursday, my group brought together in Brussels, to discuss the future of Mr Bolkestein’s symbolic text, more than 200 social actors from throughout the Union, from the confederal secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation to the representatives of the social forum from Poland and Romania, in addition to a large number of local, regional and national elected representatives. All of them expressed their strong opposition to the Commission’s text, which was described as being very dangerous by the leaders of the ETUC, for example.
Mr Schüssel, you yourself took note at Hampton Court, in October, of the phenomenal way in which this draft directive attracted real opposition in the majority of our countries, once our fellow citizens became aware of its content. According to some indiscreet sources, you said: ‘We cannot save it; we must withdraw it’. In our opinion, withdrawing the text is actually the path we should be taking, but not with a view to coming back with a new and slightly amended draft - a ‘watered-down Bolkestein’, as one of the leaders of ATTAC described it during our meeting on Thursday.
In truth, this matter has served to reveal what an increasing number of Europeans no longer want: workers being pitted against one another, and their social benefits and rights being levelled down as a consequence. It is this same logic that is rejected by all the port workers throughout the Union, irrespective of which trade union they belong to. The same goes for the Swedish workers involved in the very symbolic Vaxholm case. Other similar reports are reaching us from countries such as Finland, Scotland and Ireland.
As the years have gone by, we have surreptitiously gone from having European integration achieved through harmonisation of national legislation - that is to say through political acts and through votes, which at least gave us hope that we could harmonise from the top down – to integration achieved through the market, that is to say through unfettered competition, which naturally tends to lead to a levelling down.
You will not gain the confidence of Europeans, Mr President, without making a clean break with this liberal way of thinking, so as to really place the employee and the citizen – and no longer the market – at the centre of the European project. It is primarily in this light that your Presidency will be judged in six months’ time."@en1
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"(Applause from the Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left)"1
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