Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2016-01-20-Speech-3-056-000"
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"en.20160120.3.3-056-000"2
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"Mr President, as we welcome the Dutch Prime Minister, Mr Rutte, to the hot seat of the six-month revolving Presidency, I would like to take the opportunity to address him. Mr Rutte, I note you are a keen historian because you were quoting Winston Churchill for us this morning, and indeed Mr Verhofstadt backed you up.
You are quite right, post-war Churchill did encourage integration, especially between France and Germany, but he made it absolutely clear at all times that the United Kingdom should not be a part of it and I would like you please to acknowledge that. I also very much doubt that, 50 years after his death, Churchill would approve of the club the way it is, because he was a democrat.
This EU faces an existential crisis. Indeed, there is an outbreak of a contagious disease. It is not a new one; the Greeks first came across it a couple of thousand years ago. The virus in its new form began in Denmark in the early 1990s, but was put down with a heavy German hand. There have been a couple of outbreaks in Ireland, but substantial European money again cured the outbreak. But the red alert in 2005, when the contagion swept across the Netherlands and France, frankly has never gone away, and I think now we have simultaneous outbreaks of the disease. In Denmark it now looks to be wholly irreversible and, in my own country, despite decades of our political establishment denying its existence, a recent opinion poll showed that sufferers may now be actually in a majority. What surprised me about your speech, as the Dutch Prime Minister, is that you did not mention the fact that 427 000 of your own citizens have outed themselves in public, declared themselves to be carriers, called a referendum for 6 April and encouraged the rest of the country to join in. I suppose it must be embarrassing for you.
The diagnosis, by the way, will not be popular in this House: the disease is called democracy. People want to have a say on their future. Mr Juncker here says that there will be a continental crisis if the Dutch vote no. Well I’ll drink to that, is all I can say. When you add to that Schengen, and when you add to that people’s utter revulsion at what happened in Cologne, I think that you are going to have a very, very hot time over the course of the next six months.
Whether we can, the peoples of Europe, break this Union between now and the end of June, I do not know. But I will tell you what, we going to have a damn good go."@en1
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"(Applause from UKIP Group)"1
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