Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-12-Speech-1-088"
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"en.20070312.17.1-088"2
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"Mr President, as everyone has said, the report by our fellow Member, Mr Ferreira, brings us once again to the heart of this European social model, which sets us apart from the United States.
Behind this report, of course, there are children, there are the elderly, there are the sick, there are those excluded from society, there are disabled people and, finally, in the end, if we are not careful, there will be euthanasia, with the Netherlands, Belgium and, soon, France.
We are therefore in the realm of what we, the people of France, have for over a century – in thousands of books, lessons and university theses – been calling ‘public services’. That is why, on 29 May 2005, the people of France rejected the constitution of private services. Indeed, with the magnificent word ‘public service’, we are saying that, in a society of women and men, there are shared dimensions of what is owned by a nation as a whole, and that it is within these shared dimensions, such as hospitals, schools and health care, that services are provided to the public. This terminology is superior to that of services of general interest, a term that creates ambiguity and problems in terms of the boundaries between the private sector and the general interest, and between the commercial market – with the competition between overriding interests – and public goods, something that St Thomas Aquinas, back in his day, already used to call the common weal.
It is precisely because of this problem of boundaries that we are drafting legislation: what are these services, where do they come from, what budget should be allocated to them, which powers fall under the Union, on the one hand, and subsidiarity, on the other, what geographical boundaries are there between Mrs Thatcher’s Europe and social Europe, what boundary is there in terms of housing, employment, childcare, hospital care, between the rich, who can go private, and the poor, who cannot?
One US President had a sign on his desk that read: ‘The buck stops here’. This is the definition of social services of general interest: ‘The market stops here’."@en1
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