Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-01-18-Speech-3-280"
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"en.20060118.20.3-280"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I really have only two brief things to say. The first is to quote Mr Brok who, at the beginning of the debate, said that the citizens are the stakeholders. It is Europe’s citizens who are the most important target group and who have the most to gain or to lose from how we handle the issue of a new Constitutional Treaty for Europe.
The second is to say that democracy is no spectator sport. It requires us to engage in debates and in a dialogue with people, to involve our political leaders and our citizens in every possible way and to help each other play our different roles in this connection.
Having so many times heard wry comments along the lines of ‘what is it in the “no” vote that you do not understand’, I want to add that, in actual fact, opinion polls and interviews have told us precisely why people have come out in favour of, or voted against, the Constitutional Treaty. It is not something we have invented. We know that every referendum, the scope of which includes constitutional issues, involves a risk of one’s in actual fact obtaining answers to questions that have not been asked. That is something of which politicians in all our Member States are aware.
Nor is there anything particularly odd about the fact that 25 Member States engaging in a debate about how we are to rise to the constitutional challenge posed by a Europe whose membership has grown from 15 to 25 countries should, in actual fact, wonder how we are to extricate ourselves from a situation in which two Member States have rejected the Constitutional Treaty while 14 have approved it. How do we deal with that situation? Are we now simply to bring the process to an end, or is there a way out of the situation? There is nothing odd about these reflections. You are making things rather too easy for yourselves. What is most interesting is that those who represent UKIP (the UK Independence Party) and call this Assembly a sham parliament appear to be all too happy not to contribute a single constructive idea of their own and to let European taxpayers pay their salaries as Members of that sham parliament.
I think we need, in actual fact, to buck up our ideas and conduct an intellectually honest debate about the issues concerning Europe. We know a very great deal, and there is no short cut. However much you may laugh, all we can do is engage in debate and dialogue with people and to discuss factual matters before linking them to the constitutional solutions that are necessary if we are to obtain a more open, more democratic and more efficient Europe."@en1
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