Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-01-19-Speech-3-014-000"
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"en.20110119.4.3-014-000"2
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"Mr President, Mr Van Rompuy, my main memory of the last Council meeting was not reflected in your summary and, therefore, I would like to sum the meeting up in a different way. From today’s perspective, the most important thing which I remember is that during the summit of the Heads of State or Government in Brussels, the rating agency Moody’s downgraded Ireland’s credit rating.
That was the point at which we all became aware of the extent of our failure to manage the crisis, which we still have to deal with today. Anyone who compares the key figures for the debt crisis from different countries can only be surprised at how successful the speculation against the euro has been. In the meantime, one country which has much greater problems than Portugal and Spain, namely the USA, remains completely untouched by the war that the speculators are waging on the euro. That is the current state of affairs.
A new year has started and we have new problems to contend with. We should be dealing here and now with the problem that we predicted during the meeting, in other words, that what was decided in the meeting would not be enough. I believe that we have all realised by now that many European countries are in difficulties. They have a huge burden of debt, including both private debt and an unacceptable level of public debt. Many of the Member States of the European Union will not be able to resolve their problems without help.
What should our next step be? We believe that simply reducing national debt, as many countries are beginning to do, with the encouragement of the European Union and its joint resolutions, is not sufficient on its own and that these countries are being pushed to the limits of what is acceptable. A new agreement needs to be reached concerning how this can work in a genuinely acceptable way. I believe that developments like those in Hungary, for example, are sending out a warning signal about what happens when the distribution of wealth in the countries of the European Union is too unjust and the divide is too great. During the process of reducing public debt, we must pay much more attention to fairness than we have done so far.
In addition, we believe, and I would like to make this very clear, that the banking sector must be restructured. We are not convinced that we can justify increasing the debt burden even further in order to rescue the ‘walking dead’ in this area. I would like to endorse fully what Mrs Goulard has said. We need an approach which will allow us to prepare Europeans for the future in the context of a Green New Deal and to set a new course in this crisis. I would like to emphasise once again that Europe is a wonderful place to live and we have a lot to do to ensure that it remains that way."@en1
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