Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-02-27-Speech-3-192"
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"en.20020227.14.3-192"2
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"Mr President, generally, when we have to deal here with proposals on the compilation of statistics, the Members of this House are not particularly enraptured – as is apparent this evening – because they regard it as a technical matter which is essentially of little concern to politicians. Our electors are surely unlikely to be interested either in the work and effort we devote to these proposals.
I am often the rapporteur on proposals concerning the compiling of statistics by Eurostat, and I am forever preaching to my fellow Members that ill-informed citizens or politicians – yes, even female politicians – will misjudge situations and take unwise decisions, and that is dangerous. When it comes to statistics, there are certainly some people who delight in citing the quotation about there being three kinds of lies – lies, damned lies and statistics – on the grounds that quoting statistics is the most devious form of lying. Be that as it may, we still must not forget that reliable and comparable statistics are a necessity. Eurostat does excellent work in this domain and will continue to do so, provided that we politicians furnish it with a legal base and the financial resources it requires to perform its task.
Having said this, now that we all have the single currency in our pockets, I should like to emphasise the need to have statistics on labour costs at our disposal, because they are part of the indispensable information that makes it possible to evaluate what is actually happening on the ground in terms of inflation within the euro area, to evaluate developments that are crucial to the stability of our currency, which is now the currency of all our countries apart from the three that have not adopted it. It is wrong to say – and I disagree with the rapporteur here – that the cost of labour is not a source of inflation, because it is simply not true that increases in labour costs are always justified by the rising cost of living or by improvements in the productivity of the workforce. Think of what is happening in Germany, where, contrary to all common sense, the trade unions are demanding pay rises which would threaten thousands of jobs and increase inflation at a time when the largest Member State of the European Union is already causing us enough concern over its compliance or non-compliance with the Stability Pact.
Mr Solbes can tell us something of what went on in the Council of Ministers, because many people believe that the Stability Pact has already died a natural death. This is why every effort must be made to ensure that we obtain as quickly as possible a common framework for the production, communication and evaluation of comparable labour-cost indices of the sort that will result from this proposed regulation, which must be adopted as soon as possible. My group, by the way, does not agree with the amendments tabled by the rapporteur on behalf of his group, because he is asking for things that are impracticable and counterproductive – and this, incidentally, is also the view of the Commission and Eurostat. We shall therefore reject these amendments."@en1
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