Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-01-16-Speech-3-093"
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"en.20020116.6.3-093"2
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"Mr President, first of all, I should like to extend a warm welcome to the Spanish Presidency.
Prime Minister Aznar, we have great faith in you, and we also wish you every success on the sound plans you have for the coming six months.
In my view, an important task is to ensure that the Convention, which is to develop proposals on Europe’s future, gets off to a flying start. It is also important that this be done quickly, and I am pleased to hear it is to be launched as soon as the end of February. I have heard you say that the reform, or deepening, of the European institutions is necessary in order to make a success of enlargement. I could not agree more. I have also heard you call for more co-decision and more transparency. I would like to endorse that too. The European Parliament must become a normal parliament with full legislative powers, and the Council, in its capacity as co-legislator, must become more transparent in its working practices, possibly modelling itself on the German Federal Council.
I also support Mr Aznar’s plea for anti-terrorism policy to be accelerated and Europol to be reinforced. Mr Aznar, you are right in saying that tougher action is required to tackle the drugs trade. Together with the trafficking in human beings, the drugs trade appears to be one of the key sources of funding for terrorism. It is high time we clamped down on this evil, and I hope you will receive Dutch support for this.
I should like to finish off with an observation with regard to socio-economic policy. You have spoken of the need for more labour mobility. In my country, the Netherlands, there is a labour shortage. There are tens of thousands, and probably even more than one hundred thousand, vacancies for jobs which cannot be filled. The care sector and public transport spring to mind. These sectors are performing badly because of a shortage of labour. Why are European job agencies not being set up to analyse which countries have labour shortages and which have labour surpluses? Surely it should be possible, with the help of brief language courses, to help the millions of unemployed in Germany to find jobs in the Netherlands, for example. If you could do something about this, you would be helping both the countries with labour shortages and those with labour surpluses."@en1
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