Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-09-15-Speech-3-093"
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"en.19990915.9.3-093"2
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"Madam President, with Mr Prodi’s Commission, the EU is getting a real government for the first time. It is a product of the fifteen Prime Ministers, but it has now come into its own, freed from supervision by the Member States, removed from national parliaments, light years from ordinary voters and tax payers, but still not subject to supervision by the EU Parliament. The voters and the national parliaments are forfeiting power to Mr Prodi, but this power is not being picked up here in this House. Voter influence is being limited again. The executive is again being strengthened at the expense of the legislature. Mr Prodi promises he will listen and despatch a Commissioner every time we ask for one. He will seriously consider firing Commissioners if Parliament expresses its lack of confidence in them. But it is Mr Prodi and the Commission itself who decide. It is they who decide whether they have confidence in us, in the electorate and in the national parliaments, and they are still the only twenty people in the EU who can propose a new law or propose that an existing law be removed. In the Commission itself, the directors-general have again taken power. While Mr Prodi promises openness, answers concerning this are emptied of content by the directors-general. A lot of answers at the hearings were prepared by the old officials. In the draft version of Mr Kinnock’s response the officials had even written that the problem was that the Dutch official, Van Buitenen, had given too many documents to the group chairmen. The problem was not that the Commission had covered up the misappropriations. Clearly, there are still officials with things to learn.
The Experts’ Group is therefore proposing a prosecuting authority and more supranational supervision in the Member States. The Commission and the majority here will have Brussels impose more rules and manage more projects. The result will be more centralism and more fiddling and, in five years’ time, a new Committee of Wise Men will be preparing a new report on increasing fraud within the EU, for it is secretiveness and centralism which give rise to fraud. Supervision can uncover a small amount, but the solution is a radical curtailment of assignments and projects in Brussels so that, instead, the focus is upon those things that extend beyond national frontiers and can no longer be solved on a national or regional basis. We must move in the direction of a slimmed down, open and democratic EU.
My group, the Group for a Europe of Democracies and Diversities, cannot offer the Commission political support but, instead, hard-working, critical and constructive opposition. The democratic dream is that people’s conditions of life should be equal. This must not be confused with treating everyone the same, for we are different in our diversity, and that is our strength."@en1
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