Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-19-Speech-3-174"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20010919.12.3-174"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
"Mr President, I would like to congratulate both the Parliament's rapporteurs on the hard work that they put in. They produced a result which they can be proud of. It was produced after an immense amount of work very late at night. However, speaking as a British Member of the European Parliament there were enormous difficulties about these directives, particularly the Large Combustion Plants Directive. I want to focus on the point that we laboured under the enormous difficulty that neither the Commission nor the Council really came clean about the impact of what they were proposing. Nor did they give us an accurate assessment or help us assess the impact of what the European Parliament was proposing.
Mr Bowe and I, as British Members of the European Parliament, were faced with lobbies from Britain basically saying that if we adopted the Parliament's amendments, the British coal mines which are still in production would all have to close down. We were therefore faced with the possibility of voting for amendments and voting for reports from our own committee which would have had a very serious economic impact in our own Member State.
When we went to the Council of Ministers meeting, we found that there were other Member States with exactly the same problems, Finland, for example, where the ministers and governments of those countries had never really contacted their Members of the European Parliament to explain the difficulties they thought they were going to have. We also had the extraordinary situation, when we got to the codecision meeting, where four civil servants delivered speeches that really should have been made by ministers.
The point I want to make is this. We need two things: we need much greater honesty from Member States and the Commission about the actual impact in the Member States of what is being proposed and what is being discussed. There should at least be some advice on that. Secondly, when we go to the codecision meetings we must stop having meetings between fifteen MEPs, one minister, and fourteen civil servants. That is ridiculous. Many of the points made to us on the reports by Mrs Oomen-Ruijten and Mrs Myller should have been made by ministers. It is ministers we want to meet when we go to the codecision meetings."@en1
|
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples