Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-11-21-Speech-3-018-000"
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"en.20121121.4.3-018-000"2
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"Mr President, for my Group this debate encapsulates everything that needs to change about the EU. We reject the knee-jerk response of most of the people in this Chamber that the solution to every problem that we have in Member States is somehow ‘more Europe’. So, increasingly, does public opinion.
Let me say a word about new Member States. I think that enlargement has been one of the EU’s great success stories. I think that we have to accept that it will cost more money to support those Member States whose infrastructure was neglected in their communist past. That is why I believe that cohesion spending for new Member States should be maintained, even within an overall freeze or a cut in the multiannual financial framework.
The way to do that is through budgetary reform, so that cohesion policy is limited to helping those countries that need it most. It is ridiculous that 40 % of current structural and cohesion funding goes to the EU’s richest countries. Countries like my own should be freed to support our poor regions ourselves without funnelling the money through the inefficient mechanism of the EU budget. I agree with the proposals put forward by our previous socialist government that cohesion policy should be repatriated to the richer Member States and that money only be used to fund the poorer Member States who deserve that spending.
I am a bit of an optimist. I believe that a better budget – not just a bigger budget – is still achievable in the summit this week. I hope that Member States, with good grace and goodwill, will sit down and agree that we need better EU spending and not just more EU spending.
I say to President Barroso that he and many other people in this Chamber have argued that the EU budget is there to promote economic growth. We have heard a lot of glib talk from all sides of this Chamber that it is an investment budget. If it was, perhaps on this side of the House we might support more bits of it, because nobody actually believes that it is an investment budget.
If it is an investment budget, how come 40 % of it is still spent on subsidies for farmers? What about the 6 % of the budget that is for administration costs? That is not about investment for growth either. Eight Member States – not just the UK – wrote to President Barroso saying that the EUR 2 billion cost of pensions for EU civil servants in the future was unaffordable and that reform was required. You completely ignored that letter.
Mr Barroso, how can you insist – and how can the rest of you insist – that we need more spending and more money at an EU level? Five per cent of the existing budget, according to the Court of Auditors, is either spent illegally or irregularly – something like EUR 5 billion. If that money was accounted for properly, if the Commission got its expenditure controls in place, then that would take up almost all of the increase that you are all asking for.
Let us ask about some of the existing projects. Is that all money well spent? How has doubling the number of EU agencies in the last eight years affected growth across Europe? What about the new ECB building in Frankfurt that cost several hundred million euros? How is that going to contribute to more growth in Greece? And what about our presence here in Strasbourg? That costs EUR 200 million a year. How is that contributing to growth in Member States? It is not, of course. Nobody seriously believes that it is.
Mr Barroso, the EU is not short of money. It just spends the money that it has very, very badly. Let us be quite clear about this. To meet your demands for more spending, virtually every contributing Member State is going to have to borrow that extra money. They are going to have to cut their public expenditure in order to send more money to the EU.
It is completely unsustainable, it is unhelpful, and many Member States will not stand for it. Can you seriously, in all good conscience, ask those Member States to borrow that extra money to make cuts at home so that we can all spend more money here in Europe?
It is time for the EU to spend the money that it already has better so that it creates growth in national economies. Instead of demanding yet more money, why not take the time to go through the existing budget, line by line, asking yourself whether this item of expenditure really results in more economic growth in Europe?
It is not just Conservatives who are saying these things, Mr Swoboda. Even some of the socialists, I am pleased to say, are starting to see the light. The UK socialists actually want a cut in the budget, not just a freeze, which is Mr Cameron’s position. They voted in the House of Commons for a cut. And what about your great, latter-day socialist hero, President Hollande? He fought an election – remember that? – on an end to austerity. What is he saying now? He said last week that ‘we must be ready to do better by spending less’. That is the great socialist hero that you tell us is setting an example for the rest of Europe to follow."@en1
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