Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-03-Speech-3-355"
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"en.20080903.26.3-355"2
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"Mr President, this report clearly highlights the importance of services in our economies, and the importance of gradually liberalising them.
The truth is that it has been interesting for this shadow rapporteur to follow this debate, which has confirmed why some of us are sitting in the centre of this House and not at one end or the other, why some of us sit here, in the middle.
What is it that really differentiates us, putting it kindly, from people who continue to hold to a strict idea of what services are, of what can and cannot be privatised, from people who are still allergic to the idea that some services can be provided very efficiently by the private sector, often more efficiently than by the public sector, often even irrespective of how developed the country is, from people who still want to force the State to carry a great deal of weight in less developed countries, as if the answer to all their problems were for the State to be in charge of it, without taking into account that the State carrying this great deal of weight is often what is behind the enormous power that corruption has in those countries?
A few notes, a few strains of mistrust towards free competition, free enterprise, and the possibility of citizens receiving services through society itself via the free economy.
This is what we have heard in this debate. However I would also like to make it clear, and this is why we are in the centre, that we also do not entirely agree with the feeling that we sometimes get that the rapporteur — although subsequently he was generous in accepting amendments from other groups — does not really have, or at times may not have had sufficient sensitivity to assess what the general interest means, to understand that not everything is subject to the rules of the market, to understand that the Member States do of course have to have and retain the freedom to protect certain services outside of the pure market, in a regulated form or by providing them solely through the public sector.
What are those services? We cannot say. Even in Europe we are not unanimous about what the general interest is: there are different solutions to the weighting of the public and private sectors in waste collection, education, water, funeral services, cemeteries, public transport and the postal service even within Europe. However, it should be understood that education, health, etc. have a dimension that cannot be submitted purely and strictly to private enterprise.
Let us therefore promote the liberalisation of services; let us understand that by doing so we are improving the services that citizens receive. It is important for the European Union to take the initiative on this in all of its trade agreements, especially when we are seeing the collapse – which we do not know whether it is temporary or permanent – of the Doha Round, and of the multilateral framework as a whole in this area.
The European Union therefore has a considerable responsibility in demanding this increase, in practically forcing the liberalisation of services, even in less developed countries, but of course respecting their freedom and understanding that this needs to be accompanied – and I will conclude here Mr President – by very strong regulation. In many cases liberalisation needs to be accompanied by regulation, and clear rules, respecting the freedom and autonomy of each of the Member States to decide on what, for them, due to tradition, the reality of the population, or the reality of the circumstances, should continue to be part of the public sector."@en1
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