Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-02-14-Speech-2-208"
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"en.20060214.26.2-208"2
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"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, it is always the same lies that are used to justify neo-liberal policies – that jobs would be created and growth promoted, and we have heard them time and time again today. In fact, though, the neo-liberal reconstruction of Europe over the past fifteen years has had precisely the opposite effect. Each succeeding round of liberalisation measures has put hundreds and thousands of people out of work and deeper into poverty. Every encroachment on workers’ rights reduces their purchasing power and thereby throttles growth. There are those who want unfettered capitalism, and the Bolkestein directive is one of their big projects; if it becomes reality, we will see the dawn of a Europe in which market forces and the profit motive reign unchallenged, in which quality and environmental standards are downgraded and the downward spiral of wages and social security provision is accelerated in an intolerable manner.
The feeble compromise on which the conservatives and social democrats have agreed still tends in that direction; in essential areas such as water supply or education, the radically free-market thinking of the original directive is still there. The country-of-origin principle has not really been laid to rest – that much has become glaringly apparent from the speeches by both sides – but has, instead, been left to the interpretation of the European Court of Justice. Thinking back to that court’s past rulings, the big business lobby is not likely to have any problems with that. We do not want a Bolkestein directive; we do not want a Bolkestein Europe.
For we do not want a Europe that uses the concepts of equality of opportunity and freedom to provide services as a pretext for creating the best possible conditions for big business and enabling it to maximise its profits at the expense of workers and consumers. We do not want a Europe in which basic services of general interest are made the playthings of capitalist market forces. The mania for privatisation needs to be stopped and reversed. The resistance to this brutal neo-liberal project must go on.
It is thanks to this compromise that these protests are happening at all, and so I believe that this cannot be the end of the story. The fight against the directive must go on until it eventually ..."@en1
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