Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-09-11-Speech-3-021-000"
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"en.20130911.4.3-021-000"2
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"Mr President, Europe needs a new direction and that direction cannot be based on old ideas. Europe needs new thinking.
And you know what? We have tried the old interventionist, centralising, socialist-type approach. It may have been appropriate for the 1950s; today it is well past its sell-by date. So, let us try something different. Let us try a new approach. Perhaps we could rediscover the principle of freedom that many in Europe fashioned for the world, of opening our markets, of embracing enterprise, of eliminating the many vested interests in the Union.
Next year’s elections will offer us an opportunity, not to advance European political parties and their candidates, beloved of many of us although nobody in the real world has heard of them, but to give people a true choice – not a choice about who you want steering the tanker, but actually about whether you want the tanker to go in a different direction.
Many of us want change. All the polls indicate that the people of Europe want change. Next May, they will have a chance to make a stand. They can say that they do not simply want a new president for the EU; they want a new direction for it.
Now these are not my words, Mr Barroso: they are yours from the equivalent speech last year. The problem, of course, is that yet again you have not delivered on any of the big promises you have made or on any of your grand rhetoric year after year. Your chance to deliver that new direction has passed.
The question we have to address now is whether your successor will be able to deliver any of the change that the EU so desperately needs. Next year the Commission will have a fresh leader, although personally I am not optimistic that he or she will come up with any fresh ideas. Indeed, many of the applicants for your job are here today.
It is like a giant hustings meeting. Commissioner Reding, who I think has moved to the front bench now, is clearly running as the federalist candidate, producing more eye-catching babble every day that goes past. Commissioner Rehn could be delivering the speech next year, although I suspect that if he did we would all have a bit of a late lunch. And if Commissioner Rehn gets the Liberal nomination, what about poor Mr Verhofstadt? What is he going to do? Perhaps he could challenge Mr Schulz for the Socialist nomination. I am sure he would feel more at home in that group.
In fact I think I am one of the few people here who do not actually want to do your job. I am perfectly happy with the one that I have got.
The problem of course is that none of these potential candidates on show today represents any new ideas. They represent the vested interests of the past: the people of the European district in Brussels, rather than the people of Europe. And next May the choice will not be about anonymous candidates from political groupings that nobody has ever heard of. It will be about whether you want merely to shuffle the deck of cards or to throw the deck out completely and start afresh.
The essential flaw of the EU is that it simply does not trust the capacity of people and markets to overcome problems. Problems, we are told repeatedly here, can be solved only by ‘more Europe’. If somebody falls off a ladder somewhere in Europe, we need a new directive to solve it. People are not allowed to be trusted to decide their own working hours. They are not even to be allowed to take up e-cigarettes, to cite another topical example.
And when EU lawyers say, as they did yesterday, that the financial transaction tax, so beloved of so many of you, is actually illegal, that does not matter because nothing – not even the law – should stand in the way of further European integration.
We need a new Euro-realist direction with different ideas: one that says that patriotism is healthy; to be proudly German or French or Polish is not necessarily anti-European. The concepts are not mutually antagonistic, and to want a new direction for Europe is not anti-European. The real anti-Europeans are those whose idea of change in the EU only means moving further in the old, failed direction. The real nationalists are those who force us to accept a European nation, which, as reality shows, nobody in Europe actually wants."@en1
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