Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-25-Speech-4-083"
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"en.20011025.1.4-083"2
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".
The European Council in Ghent has just taken note of a Commission report on the preparation for the changeover to euro notes and coins, which presents forty "good practices" suggested to banks, governments and retailers in Member States "in order to make up for lost time".
This parenthetical remark by the Commission must surely pull us up short. Why has time been wasted, although the date for the changeover of notes and coins has been set for a long time, and governments had all the time in the world to prepare themselves? The most probable explanation is this: the authorities seem to have thought that private citizens, being in any case caught in the trap, would be obliged to adapt themselves. Under these circumstances, why should they tire themselves out? This attitude says much about the thinking behind an operation which was deceitfully presented as being entirely centred on the improved comfort of citizens.
In addition, when you look down the list of the "forty good practices ", you notice that they are minor low-level gimmicks – ranging from the early labelling of prices in euros to longer opening hours at bank counters – whose effect can only be marginal. But major actions that could conceivably lessen citizens' difficulties, whether financial (reimbursing tradesmen and small businesses for their efforts at adaptation) or technical (stating both the euro value and the value in the national currency on notes and coins), have been firmly excluded. It is true that dual-denomination notes or coins would have required thought at an earlier stage and for that there would have had to be a real concern to lighten the burden on private individuals. Nothing, though, could be more foreign to the inventors of the single currency.
Perhaps – as, after all, clouds do have silver linings – citizens will see at the beginning of next year that in fact they had counted for little in the introduction of the single currency. And then they might learn a few truths about the true nature of Brussels."@en1
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