Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-05-22-Speech-2-382-000"
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"en.20120522.18.2-382-000"2
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"Mr President, when Nigel Farage says anything here, it may make you smile, it is usually well put, but it usually has little impact. Yet when it is a colleague of Mr Rehn, namely Karel De Gucht, the European Commissioner, or a Governor of the European Central Bank, like Mr Coene, the President of the National Bank of Belgium, who starts rambling on in public, all innocent, saying no problem, Greece could leave the euro, I think this is more serious because these people are hugely responsible for what happened last week in Greece, when we saw the early signs of a bank run.
When you are a European policy maker, I do not think you should be behaving any old how with bar-room politics.
What concerns me then, as it does many of you here, is Spain. Let us be clear. Of course, this summit meeting in Brussels tomorrow may be of use, but unless it comes up with a credible answer to what we should do to avoid financial collapse in Spain or Italy, we are failing to address the urgency of the situation. We do not have many options: either we ask the European Central Bank (ECB) to buy the debt – yet, it cannot do this because of European treaties – or we go back to the solution proposed at the time by none other than Mr Sarkozy, which would be for the European Stability Mechanism to become a bank which can lend to Member States or recapitalise the banking sector. I think this is a common sense solution, and it is time we looked at this again.
Finally, on the issue of growth, I would prefer to talk about investment. If we are to go about this, as mentioned in Spain yesterday, by building 40 airports, or today in Greece, by laying the foundations for new motorways, I think we are missing the point. Unless we introduce a programme of investment that makes Europe a world leader in energy and resource efficiency, we are wasting the one real opportunity for Europe to become a twenty-first century economic leader.
This should be our one and only driving force. It is not just about investing in bricks and mortar. It is about investing in education and research, investing in health care, all of which are factors of competitiveness, to coin one of your phrases. I think that is how we should go about it."@en1
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