Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-01-20-Speech-3-116"
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"en.20100120.11.3-116"2
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"Mr President, our agenda this week, and today particularly, has been thin, meagre and truncated. We all know why. The week has been given over to backroom manoeuvring. I would say manoeuvring in smoke-filled rooms but, this being Brussels, I will say smoke-free rooms.
We have come through this nonsense of the hearings. It has produced candidates concerning whom I have to say that I have not heard of a single Member of this House who thinks we are now about to appoint the 27 best-qualified men and women in the whole of the European Union to the awesome powers concentrated in the hands of the European Commission. Not only will they be the executive, they will also have the right to initiate law – a concentration of power that is extraordinary in any context, but all the more so when we bear in mind that they are not directly answerable to the electorate. This is the most exclusive electorate in Europe – 736 MEPs get to decide who will run the continent.
You do not have to be a eurosceptic to find that objectionable. It seems to me extraordinary that this continent, which exported the idea of representative government and parliamentary democracy, which carried the seeds of democracy to far continents where they found fertile soil, should now have taken the axe to the ancestral tree here in Europe. All of us are diminished by that process."@en1
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