Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-02-15-Speech-4-237"
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"en.20010215.11.4-237"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, our discussion today is rather strange because, from what Mr Wurtz and Commissioner Solbes Mira are saying, I have the impression that they are fighting the same battle. Both of them are saying to us that you do not have the right to grow, but you do have the right to spend.
To take the first point: you do not have the right to grow. Here we have a Member State, Ireland, which has an impressive budget surplus, an extremely small budget deficit, a very high growth rate and a level of inflation which, while it is too high, particularly because of reasons beyond its control, nonetheless respects the major part of what we said must be respected in the stability pact, Yet you are telling Ireland that growth is not a good thing, despite the fact that it has respected the criteria.
Mr Wurtz is telling us that we must have the right to spend. I would point out to you, Mr Wurtz, that that is not the case in Ireland. Ireland does not spend excessively. It has strong growth precisely because of the fact that its spending is not excessive.
The decision on France, on the other hand, was to make a token gesture and issue a minor reprimand, but to state that the situation there is quite acceptable. Yet, I note that France patently does not respect its commitments. France had undertaken to reduce its public spending and to make tax cuts. This imbalance has been upset. We can see that the trend of reducing budget deficits is slowing down in France, whereas growth is becoming stable. We can see that France has the highest level of public spending of all the countries in the eurozone. We can see that France’s national budget is being used to fund spending on the wages bill, which, logically, ought to belong to the market economy. None of this is satisfactory but you do not say anything, because France, like Germany and Italy and other countries, is too big for you to handle.
I am, therefore, concerned, Commissioner, because and I am not blaming you in order to have a real ‘policy mix’, you need to be bolder, politically speaking, to be better armed, legally speaking and to be equipped, economically speaking, with rather more complex analytical equipment than we have at our disposal. In fact, in this matter, we are suffering from a lack of Europe rather than an excess of Europe, and it is the smaller countries that are taking the rap for this deficiency!"@en1
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