Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-09-28-Speech-3-025-000"
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"en.20110928.3.3-025-000"2
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".
Mr President, Mr Barroso told us this morning that the European Union is an inspiration. Mr Barroso, whilst you admitted to there being one or two little economic problems, you made it perfectly clear that jobs and growth were to follow, that everything is going well. In fact you painted a vision that a new period of European renewal is upon us.
As a former Communist yourself you probably remember the old Soviet leaders getting up to give their speeches and telling everybody that there was a record harvest or that tractor production figures were terribly good, and they of course believed that history was on their side. In fact President Khrushchev got up and said to the West: we will bury you. So much did he believe in his own Union.
Now of course we look back at that and we laugh. I think that in our tomorrows people will look back at you and they will say: how on earth did this unelected man get all of this power and how did Europe’s political class sitting in this room decide that the Community method should replace national democracy? I think people will look back in astonishment that we have surrendered democracy.
But what you want to do is to say, right, we have a European Union and what we have to do now is have more of it. So, as an architect – and you are one of the key architects of the current failure – you say that even though everything to date has been wrong we are going to do more of the same.
I thought that was a definition of madness. I cannot believe that this is a rational response to any situation in which you find yourself and, far from it being a State of the Union, I would argue that the Union is in a state because just look at the confusion. We have got you as President of the European Commission, we have a President of the European Parliament; we have got my old friend Herman van Rompuy who is the permanent President of the European Council; we have got the Poles, they are now presidents temporarily of the European Council; we have got presidents all round this room. Goodness me, even I am a President. I am not sure what the collective noun for presidents is, perhaps an incompetence. I do not know.
But certainly when you take away democratic accountability it is clear that nobody really is in charge and it is developing as a Union of intolerance. Anybody who stands up here and dares to give a political view which is different from the received wisdom is written off as mad, insane, violent and fascist; we have heard it for years from these people. The intolerance is so deep that, when we get referendums in France, the Netherlands and Ireland that reject your view, you as a political class see it as a problem to be overcome. So I am very worried about the whole root of this Union.
There is a new nationalism that is sweeping Europe. You want to abolish the nation states, in your case, Mr Schulz, perhaps because you are ashamed of your past. And you now want this flag and a new anthem to replace nation states and you do not care how you get there. If you have to crush national democracy, if you have to oppose popular referendums, you just sweep this aside and say that it is populism.
But it is not, it is democracy. What is sweeping northern Europe now, starting off in April with that amazing result in the Finnish general election, is a new democratic revolution. It is not anti-European. It wants a Europe of trade; it wants a Europe of cooperation; it wants a Europe where we can do student exchanges and we can work in each others’ capital cities; it wants those things. But it does not want this European Union model. Frankly, you are all now yesterday’s men."@en1
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