Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-09-07-Speech-2-020"
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"en.20100907.4.2-020"2
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"Mr President, this grand occasion, Mr Barroso’s State of the Union speech, does not quite put him on a par with President Obama. There is one fundamental difference, Mr Barroso: President Obama is elected, and you are not. Forty-eight million people watched his address, and here in the European Parliament we even have to beg MEPs to turn up to listen to you.
This form of government is not working, and yet what we heard today is that we are going to have a common defence policy and a common foreign policy.
The other reason why these polls are where they are is that people do not respect you because you cheated to get the Lisbon Treaty through. We were told it would simplify everything, that we would know where we stand. Well we do not. Who is in charge of this EU? Is it you, Mr Barroso? Is it my old friend, Herman Van Rompuy? Is it the Belgian Presidency? That really is good stuff! You still cannot form a government in your own country and yet you have the Presidency of the European Union! Whichever way you look at it, the whole thing is a bit of a dog’s dinner really.
The EU has never had so much power, and yet it has never been so unpopular. But not satisfied with the EUR 2.4 billion a year that is now being spent on EU propaganda, you want the overall budget to increase by 6%, and we understand that you personally are to have a full-time TV crew to traipse round with you, new press officers, new webmasters. You are not analysing why this is going wrong, Mr Barroso; you simply do not get it.
You completely ignored the state of the Union. You said how you felt things were going, you pointed your way forwards. However, Eurobarometer, the Commission’s own polling organisation, tells us the truth. It tells us that in the last six months, there has been a dramatic drop in confidence as regards people’s belief in even belonging to the Union: a 10% drop in Germany; a 17% drop in Greece and a 9% drop in Portugal. Less than half of EU citizens think that being a member of the club is worth it.
Even more revealing is that in your own country of Portugal, over the last six months, a further one in four people have lost total faith in EU institutions. That, Mr Barroso, is hardly an endorsement of success or belief, and yet from most people today, there seems to be such great self-satisfaction.
Well, do not be too satisfied, because the people have worked it out for themselves: the real state of the Union is that it is increasingly loathed and despised. And yet some claim that this is because they want more Europe! Mr Verhofstadt said that people want more common policies. No! The evidence is clear.
Interesting, Mr President! When
barrack people, I get threatened with fines. But never mind.
The evidence shows that the more common policies there are, the less people like it. People have recognised the devastation of the common fisheries policy; they have recognised the inequality of the common agricultural policy; the lost business opportunities of a common commercial policy; and, of course, now the big one: the common currency, this ill-conceived political attempt to force people into a monetary union without ever asking any of them whether they wanted to be there. Well, it is perfectly clear that this currency does not suit Germany and it does not suit Greece. One is now trapped inside an economic prison. You can pretend the crisis has gone away, but it has not, because the bond spreads are now 8% on five and ten-year bonds.
You can smile, Mr Schulz, but you know nothing of financial markets or how these things work. And, in your own country, well, why should the German taxpayer increasingly pick up the bill?"@en1
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