Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-07-04-Speech-2-168"
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"en.20000704.8.2-168"2
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"Mr President, rapporteur, ladies and gentlemen, we spent this morning discussing institutional affairs with President Jacques Chirac and this afternoon discussing budgetary matters which really amounts to one and the same thing.
Firstly, the budget with its EUR 93 million in payment appropriations represents a 5% increase, whereas national budgets are subject to greater austerity. However, the European agricultural budget is also experiencing a period of austerity, even though outwardly it appears to have grown by 7%. Agricultural revenue has dropped and so this 7% is a mere illusion; we have simply moved from a price support policy to an income support policy. We are witnessing the continued, and wholly scandalous, misappropriation of EUR 300 million of agricultural funds for the reconstruction of Kosovo, as though the Balkans formed part of the CAP! The CAP is being drastically cut back to the advantage of the CFSP and, as you will see, this is being carried out with no modification to the Treaties.
We are here as part of a consultation procedure that the Treaties do not provide for and we are operating within the framework of an Interinstitutional Agreement of May 1999 that the Treaties do not provide for either. Over the past 20 years, non-essential expenditure has increased from 5% to more than 45% of the total budget expenditure without any modification to the Treaties. We have carried out an institutional revolution, to Parliament’s advantage, without an IGC. Does this mean that the institutions are to adapt spontaneously or that the European Commission and Council will be able to operate with 20-21 members just as they do with 15 and, empirically speaking, solutions will be found?
If at the IGC in Nice we tried to make enlargement conditional upon deepening, this would be viewed as a pretext for delaying the entry of the countries of the East, and Poland has recently voiced its displeasure at this. We are all aware that the accession of the countries of the East would mean a budgetary revolution and increased taxes. In other words, the revolution that looks set to take place in European affairs over the coming ten years is not an institutional one but a budgetary and tax one."@en1
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