Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-10-23-Speech-2-229"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20071023.23.2-229"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Mr President, for budget debates, there is a well-known law we call the law of the three ‘Ls’, because budget debates involve reeling off Litanies, like in a religious Liturgy, which ends up causing economic Lethargy. We are finding this with the 2008 budget.
The litanies first. Mr Virrankoski reels off these litanies like Mr Elles did in 2006, and like our fellow Member Mr Garriga Polledo did in 2005. First of all, the litany of cutting off appropriations: in the draft budget, the Council of Ministers cuts off the appropriations in the preliminary draft budget. Mr Mulder has explained to us that this is quite normal for agriculture, for example. The European Parliament, however, is proposing to restore the appropriations. The litany is also one of a budget consistently below the ceilings of the multiannual financial framework. The multiannual financial framework is already very short of the necessary appropriations and the budget even more so. It is a cascade of Malthusianism. It is also a litany of political priorities: year after year, fighting poverty, education, training, agricultural multifunctionality and the seventh framework programme on research are mentioned, and that is where the liturgy comes in.
The liturgy is primarily in the budgetary nomenclature and the ideology supporting that nomenclature. The nomenclature is the presentation of the budget by activity, the preparation of the budget by activity. In practice, the expenditure is chopped up into titles, into political fields, which correspond to the directorates-general. The budget is like a huge salami, a type of grocer’s shop inventory, the problem being, as the rapporteur has seen, that dividing the budget up by activity creates confusion with the multiannual financial framework, which is split into broader categories. One has five categories: competitiveness, preservation of natural resources, freedom, the EU as a global partner, administration, and the other has about thirty political activities, and the correspondence between these categories is difficult to establish.
All this is done in the name of a budgetary ideology, the ideology of performance, competitiveness, effectiveness, efficiency and results, and this creates a jumble of nebulous tools, results indicators, performance indicators, activities sheets. This budgetary technology is presented as new, as being in the vanguard of budgetary intelligence, but it is actually something quite old, dating back to 1947. It was the American Hoover Committee that first talked about the concepts of performance, cost/benefit, efficiency, targets and results. It was this that gave the US the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System in the 1960s under the Johnson Presidency, and that under President Carter gave the BBZ, or budget base zero – the budgetary performance ideology that subsequently spread to New Zealand, the United Kingdom, France in 2001 with its organic law on finance laws, and even Mexico in 2006.
One might understand from this why the European budget is lacking in transparency and really in efficiency too. The European Parliament does not contain 100 people capable of understanding the European budget by activity, with the consequence that this entails: the economic lethargy of the European Union. Because if there is no Galileo, if there is no Lyon-Turin link, if there is no Genoa-Barcelona link, if the capital cities are not connected by high-speed trains, if the research budget is not what it should be, if the budget for a Europe of 27 Member States is the same as the Spanish budget, if the European budget is one twentieth of the budget of the United States, it is precisely because of this Malthusian ideology. Perhaps it is time we realised that alongside the ordinary budget, we need an extraordinary budget to make loans financed by a major European loan, which would permit investment."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples