Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-23-Speech-3-042"
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"en.20070523.3.3-042"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, my heartfelt thanks go to all those who have worked on this project, the result of which is an improvement on what we had before we started our deliberations.
There is also a certain amount of good news, firstly that the burden is being lifted from the consumers; secondly that the EU has demonstrated its capacity to act; thirdly, that the House has a regulation before it that is time-limited and expires at the end of three years – and I hope it really will do that – and, fourthly, that we are helping to make things more transparent. That is important if there is to be competition, with the consumers being able to decide for themselves which tariff they want or which service provider they are going to opt for.
There is, though, one big problem, and we must not, I think, mince words in addressing it; it is that we are intervening as a political entity and are nevertheless determining prices, and the prices we are fixing are those paid by the end user, yet that is not what politicians are for; price-fixing is not one of our duties. There may be other political and economic systems in which that is an objective, but I do not see it as something that European policy-makers ought to be doing.
It may well be, too, that we are failing to consider the consequences of this sort of intervention in pricing, for it is very likely that someone somewhere is going to have to pay the price for this. If we carry on carping about the way things are and keep on interfering in them, then, far from achieving what we want to achieve, the whole thing will end up turning out to be a Pyrrhic victory.
Arbitrary prices? Are the prices that we are now determining, really the right ones? In essence, they have been arrived at by way of negotiations. Fair-minded people must concede that what you end up with down this road is a result that is to some degree the outcome of chance. The good thing about it is that the Council has ensured that the prices in question are maxima, and that is the right way to go about it. If we are going to resort to price-fixing, then we ought to start by capping them, something that – theoretically at least – leaves the option of regulation open and does not exclude the possibility of a degree of competition setting in below the maximum imposed.
Is this a one-off situation or a precedent? That is the crucial question. My fear is that it was a precedent. One Member has just been brutally frank enough to say that, at last, a taboo has been broken, for we have intervened in the market, and that is precisely what should not happen; that is what I find regrettable, and, indeed, wrong."@en1
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