Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-04-Speech-2-020"
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"Mr President, on behalf of the Social Democratic Group, I too would like to thank Mr Toubon for a report which, overall, we can support because it contains a great many positive aspects of particular importance to the members of our Group. That is as it should be, for what we are talking about here is the future of the internal market; we are talking about answering the questions that people who live in the European Union are asking; and we are talking about confidence in European Union policies.
To Ms Riis-Jørgensen, I would say this: it is not good enough to read only those passages of the report that give one particular personal satisfaction; the text needs to be considered in its entirety. Nowhere does it say that free competition, the internal market and deregulation are the only priorities. Quite the opposite, in fact, for a great many social democratic aspects have been included. To take one example, in paragraph 8 we have spelled out the importance of impact assessment, which is particularly relevant in terms of social rights and labour law. That is the key to achieving the much repeated aim of ensuring that people come before the economy, and not the other way round – and that has to be the priority in any policy in which we invest our efforts.
Another aspect of this report that is very positive for us as Social Democrats is the move to extend the scope of harmonisation, as opposed to simple mutual recognition. Mutual recognition in itself is not bad, but harmonisation is better. In effect, we have come up with a response which not only offers an effective form of protection, at a high level, for members of the public, but also makes it clear that we cannot have a scenario of competition between Member States’ social systems; what we want is cooperation between the different social systems, based on the highest possible values. This is an extremely important point and we have done very well to get it across.
Another particularly important achievement for us as Social Democrats was the last-minute agreement on services of general interest. I welcome the fact that the European People’s Party has moved forward on the basis of the text currently in preparation for the Treaty on European Union. It is right that defending services of general interest should be one of our priorities and that we should address the legal uncertainties currently facing such services in the European Union, with a view to protecting the public and meeting demand in this area.
There is one point, however, on which we as Social Democrats must withhold our approval, and that is the ‘Internal Market Test’. Nowhere in the text, Mr Schwab, is there a stipulation on this Internal Market Test, and I would suggest that you need to read the text more closely. For us as Social Democrats, an Internal Market Test is not a yardstick that we want to apply – or at least not until similar emphasis is placed on other tests such as gender mainstreaming or social impact, which follow from the Treaties. Until tests like these, which are required by the European Union Treaties, are routinely conducted, we cannot give our approval to a test that is not even provided for in the Treaties. This is another point on which our position has to be very clear."@en1
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