Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-10-25-Speech-2-499-000"
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"en.20111025.29.2-499-000"2
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"Madam President, the global recession and the faltering economy hampered by the continuing problems of the eurozone are undoubtedly having a negative effect on European businesses and therefore on European jobs. However, it is not just economic troubles that are causing this painful rise in unemployment in all regions of Europe. Before we become too self-congratulatory, we should look at the policies of our own EU institutions, which are shouldering a large part of the blame.
Now I realise that this debate is primarily focused on Arcelor and on Nokia, but I also want to mention my very serious concerns about a large and important employer in my region of Northumberland. I am talking about Alcan, the aluminium smelter. Alcan is a smelter which, earlier this month, announced that it may have to close and it may have to close partly because it has effectively been strangled by EU legislation. The Emissions Trading Scheme and the Large Combustion Plants Directive have caused Alcan to face serious competitivity problems. Closure of the plant will mean the direct loss of around 750 jobs and many more indirectly in a part of Northumberland which is already afflicted by very high levels of unemployment.
I and many others warned about the knock-on effects of ill-thought-out legislation such as this, but our concerns were brushed aside by the Greens and over-zealous environmentalists whose fixation on reducing carbon emissions made them deaf to all of the arguments about economic and environmental damage. We warned of the risks to businesses, we warned of the risks to jobs, and we warned about the serious effect that it would have on the environment caused by carbon leakage.
Employers like Alcan and ArcelorMittal are at breaking point, and one by one they are going to relocate to other parts of the world where they are not choked by the same cumbersome environmental legislation that we have here in Europe. Of course we want to reduce carbon emissions, of course we want to avoid carbon leakage, but we do not do that by exporting jobs and by exporting companies to other parts of the world. We do nothing but export jobs and we export the emissions along with them."@en1
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