Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-09-17-Speech-5-018"
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"en.19990917.2.5-018"2
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"Madam President, there are certain quaint eccentricities in the operation of the building and in its catering, for instance, coffee not being served during sessions, no white wine available by the glass, the fact that the pizzas taste like cardboard and the fact that the newspaper shop is about as far away from the entrance where Members come in as it is possible to be.
Nevertheless those are things we can deal with. The design of the building is not entirely to my taste. The designer clearly must have had Breughel’s Tower of Babel in mind. But I accept that you, Mr Priestley and the people of Strasbourg have made enormous efforts to try and cope with these. I agree with Mr Andrews that inevitably there were some teething problems. The biggest remaining problem is the lifts, which seem to have a mind of their own. If you run very fast – which does not help the handicapped – you might get in before someone inside it closes the door in your face because they are fed up with stopping on every floor.
Nevertheless, the building is a comparatively good one. It is cheap compared to the House of Commons in London, where nearly FRF 1 million has been spent on a desk.
My main complaint is not about the treatment of Members but about the treatment of staff. It seems to me that whoever has been making these decisions has treated the staff, in some cases, rather shabbily. Certainly the committee staff who work with me now have to fit three people, three desks and chairs, three telephones and three sets of papers into a room that used to be used by one Member in IPE I or IPE II. This is not an effective way of making sure that this institution works properly and effectively.
The last point I would make is that in many cases we have been blaming the building when it is the politicians we should be blaming. The building is here because of decisions made at the Edinburgh Council by Mr Major, who institutionalised our constant peregrinations between Brussels and Strasbourg – beautiful as this city is – to the detriment of our efficiency as an institution that is meant to be working on behalf of the people of the European Union.
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