Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-02-13-Speech-2-125"
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"en.20070213.16.2-125"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, in setting its economic objectives, the German Presidency of the European Council is relying on a report claiming that unemployment has fallen in Europe. However, this reduction is in fact the consequence of a fall in the number of people of working age due to the aging of the population, rather than the result of a prosperous economy. With an annual growth rate of just 2.6%, compared with 3.6% in the United States and 10% in China, the Europe of Brussels is still lagging behind the world's great economic powers.
On top of that, some Member States falsify the official employment statistics. In France, for example, if we add to the 2 million or more official unemployed people those people who have been forced into retirement or early retirement, the unemployed people in training, and those on subsidised contracts, unemployment actually affects almost 4.5 million people in France, or 18% of the working-age population. With growth at half mast, a population growing at below replacement rate, and businesses relocating their activities, the European Union is, unfortunately, continuing to decline economically.
If, then, the diagnosis is incorrect, the treatments prescribed, inspired by the Malthusian and antisocial policy of the last 20 years, are harmful: our trade borders have been destroyed, opening up our industry to unfair competition from the Asiatic economies, bureaucratic restrictions have multiplied, more than a million immigrants arrive quite legally from outside the Community every year, our public services have been dismantled, we are overtaxed, and our agriculture, subjected to the Caudine forks of the World Trade Organisation, has been laid fallow.
In order to restore our economies to prosperity and to give our descendents the economic and social security to which they are entitled, we need to construct a different Europe and a different trade model, based on secure borders to protect our businesses from social dumping, on implementing the Community preference, and on respect for the values that made our civilisation so great: fatherland, freedom, work, family, and security in all its forms, including economic and social security."@en1
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