Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-11-Speech-3-020"
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"en.20090311.3.3-020"2
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"Mr President, with all respect to you, Mr Vondra, it is unacceptable that, in a situation like the current one, the President-in-Office of the Council is not present. This also indicates the nature of his attitude to the current situation.
We have heard many of the old familiar phrases being repeated. We have been listening to this sort of thing for months and we could use the phrases to produce templates. Mr Daul, I would like to congratulate you on your wonderful speech! If you go on making speeches like this, the people in Lipsheim and Pfettisheim will begin to think that you have joined the French Communist Party. It is really wonderful and it all sounds excellent. However, now we actually need to deliver something. We must make the necessary decisions. More must be done in the European Council. The crisis is deepening and jobs are being lost. We have seen EUR 40 billion wiped off the value of shares in the last six months. This means that people’s livelihoods are being destroyed. This means that jobs are being lost. This means that companies are being threatened with closure. This means that national economies are being threatened with collapse. Then the Council comes up with nice little resolutions, such as the fiscal stimulus of 1.5% of GDP this year or next year. Three Member States have implemented the resolution so far, which means that 24 states have not. Great Britain, Germany and Spain have done this, and incidentally, all three were pressured by social democrats and socialists, and the other Member States have not. You must do more! You must tell the absent President-in-Office of the Council this.
Mr Barroso, you have made a wonderful speech. It was excellent and we support it fully. Solidarity between the Member States is urgently needed. For us as social democrats and socialists, solidarity is the central concept in this situation. Solidarity between people in society, but also solidarity between states. Solidarity within the eurozone and solidarity between the eurozone and the states outside it. It is important for the Commission to urge the Member States to show solidarity.
It is also important for the Commission to provide us with the draft directives we need to control private equity and hedge funds, to ensure the transparency of credit rating agencies, to keep managers’ salaries within reasonable limits and to close tax havens. These initiatives are urgently needed. We hope that you will implement them and we are relying on you to do so. If it is no longer possible to achieve this within this parliamentary term, we will be making all these demands again on the first day of the new Parliament. When I hear the head of Citigroup, which has once again made a profit, and when I hear Mr Ackermann from Deutsche Bank, which has once again made a profit in the first quarter, I wonder whether these people believe that they can just go on as before, now that they have been bailed out by the state. No, we must put in place controls and transparency to ensure that these people cannot repeat what they have done in the past.
My third point is that I am fascinated when I hear the members of the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats speaking. It is wonderful. You are saying all the things which we have been saying for years and which you have always voted against. You seem suddenly to have woken up. However, when it comes to Amendment 92, to a resolution to do more, in other words a fiscal stimulus of 1.5% of GDP, the PPE-DE does not vote in favour. Amendment 92 will be the litmus test for you when we vote on it at midday. On the question of solidarity, you have just said on behalf of your absent group, Mr Daul, that this is a good thing. Let us see if you vote in favour of Amendment 102, in which we are demanding solidarity.
One final remark which is of crucial importance for our group relates to Amendment 113 concerning tax havens. The people who serve us in restaurants, the drivers who drive our cars, the ground staff at the airports who unload our suitcases, are all taxpayers whose taxes are being used to prevent the big banks from failing, because governments and parliaments require these people to make a contribution. These are the people who must pay for the safety nets that have been put in place for the banks and the large companies. Now the managers of these large banks, who are still paying themselves bonuses of millions of euros, for example, at ING which has deficits of several billion, are to be given the opportunity to put their money into tax havens and to avoid paying tax. This is a class war from above, which we at least do not want to be part of. Therefore, the question of whether we decide today that the European Parliament is against tax havens is a decisive question for the credibility of the PPE-DE and the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. You are talking like the socialists, but we want to see whether you vote like the socialists at midday.
We have put our three demands on the table and I would like to state quite clearly that if you do not vote in favour of them, then we will not have a joint resolution. Then it will be clear that we stand for social justice and that the PPE-DE can only produce empty words."@en1
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