Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2017-07-05-Speech-3-506-000"
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"en.20170705.37.3-506-000"2
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"Mr President, let me begin by thanking the shadow rapporteurs in the other groups for their excellent work and cooperation throughout this process. And may I please also pay particular tribute to Emily Stewart in my office whose work on this has been exemplary and without whom I would not be able to be standing here and present this report to this House?
I’m also extremely grateful to the committees that put their input into this report, namely the Development Committee, the Agriculture Committee and the Cultural Committee. But I am very disappointed that there were not more committees contributing to this process, because we have had many MEPs put forward their expertise, but we need a full breadth of committees involved in this process, because a key ask of this report is that the Commission use all of its departments and instil the UN sustainable development goals throughout all of the Commission’s departments. And unless we practise that in this Parliament, it will be difficult to act as the exemplar for others.
Imagine if you will, a world where no child is born into hunger, where no child is born into poverty, where access to health care and clean water – some of the things you might take for granted – are available to everyone, where well-paid jobs, decent jobs, don’t come at the expense of the environment, and where we all act together as stewards, not owners, of this planet, and that we can forward it to the next generation.
This doesn’t just have to be a pipe dream, and it certainly doesn’t have to be the preserve of one group in this House. This goal is something we as humans must all own and make a reality. The goals defined through the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals will achieve this if we put the necessary measures into practice. I am very grateful to the Commission for its initial assessment of progress, again but I have to be perfectly honest, it is not enough to look at existing work and then backfit it into the 17 UN sustainable development goals.
We have to be honest with ourselves, not just about the scale of our ambition, but the scale of the task at hand. When we conduct our trade, when we develop shared energy networks, when we draw up financing rules, when we draw up strategies for transportation, when we evaluate education, when we drive forward change at a local, city, regional, national and European level we must always ask ourselves: ‘are we doing enough and is what we are doing delivering the UN’s sustainable development goals?’
We and our generation are running out of excuses, and we don’t have the excuse of previous generations of ignorance. We know how our actions today will affect the world around us tomorrow. There is a school group up there! Hello, it is your future we’re discussing today, and the decisions that we take in this place and across all of the EU’s institutions will have ramifications.
It is great news that Vice-President Timmermans will chair the multi-stakeholder forum, but it is essential that the Commission use this forum properly to learn from other actors, to share best practice and to report back to this Parliament. We didn’t get everything through that we wanted to in this report and I’m sure we will hear from others about some of the compromises that don’t go far enough, and that is a fair criticism. But we must use this infrastructure to have a proper discussion; a proper discussion across all layers of government and hold the Commission to account on its promises, but also have the Commission report to us.
I ask each and every group in this House to have somebody on their Bureau responsible for delivering this, because the world needs leadership. Mr Commissioner, when you go to the UN in New York, we want you to take the views of this House forward, because it is time for the EU to step up and show that leadership."@en1
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