Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-11-21-Speech-3-014-000"
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"en.20121121.4.3-014-000"2
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"Mr President, six years ago Tony Blair, who was then the President of the Council, when presenting the multiannual financial framework for 2006–2012 said in this House ‘never again must we repeat the negotiations on this framework in the same way’. But here we are again still talking about the same budget, a budget of more or less 1 % of Europe’s GDP, and we are still dealing with reluctant Britain.
The only difference now is that Mr Blair has been replaced by Mr Cameron and that the Labour Party is led now by Mr Edward Miliband who a few weeks ago – for purely populist reasons – made a coalition with the Europhobes of the Conservative Party to make a deal on the EU budget even more difficult, if not impossible. So there we are for the moment.
I will not talk about the details of this budget, but let me be very blunt: the whole debate on a little bit more or a little bit less than 1 % of the European GDP is completely ridiculous. First of all, the budgets of Member States like Germany and France are eight to 10 times bigger than the European budget. In recent years they have increased faster than the European budget.
The European budget is EUR 140 billion. Do you know what the total budgets of all the Member States of the European Union are? EUR 6 300 billion, EUR 6.3 trillion, that is 50 times bigger than the European budget of EUR 140 billion. The daily contribution of citizens to the European budget is 67 cents a day; that is less than a cup of coffee or, for Mr Callanan, less than a cup of tea.
Secondly, in the United States, the federal budget is 24 % of GDP. Switzerland is a confederation and has a budget of 12 % of GDP, and we cannot agree on 1 %. The European budget is smaller than the budget of smaller Member States like Belgium or Austria. I have the latest figures here: between 2000 and 2010 national budgets in the EU increased by 62 %, that is more or less twice as much as the European budget.
If we want to make a real federal European Union, which we will need to do for tomorrow, the least we can say is that 1 % will not be enough in the future. It is a good starting point, but it cannot be the endgame for the future if we want to really tackle the problems. If we want to overcome the euro crisis or if we want to have a general union, we will need more.
Finally, cuts in the European budget are seen in many of our Member States, and certainly in Britain, as the way to solve their budgetary problems. But the opposite is true. A strong European budget is the only way to overcome the budgetary problems of the Member States: pooling money at European level instead of wasting money at the national level. We have to be very firm on this, and politically this Parliament has to be ready to block a deal if it does not correspond to what was proposed by the Commission."@en1
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