Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-02-12-Speech-3-018"
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"en.20030212.3.3-018"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to return to the Spring Summit. The final Lisbon Objective – to make the European economy the most competitive knowledge-based economy in ten years – appeared to many, right from the start, to be an optimistic, consolatory slogan. In actual fact, it seems increasingly less consolatory seeing as, three years later, very little headway has been made towards attaining that objective. The European economy is still at the starting-post, the necessary reforms are postponed or watered-down at each summit and the hopes of unemployed Europeans of finding work thanks to growth are still closely associated with the revival of the economy of that driving force: the United States.
During the Spring Summit, the Heads of State and Government will probably confirm their commitment to the Lisbon Objectives, even though as things stand, we cannot be sure of this. A letter addressed to the Greek Presidency is already doing the rounds, reaffirming the need and desire to revitalise the European economy through ambitious structural reforms. Good – very good, we will say – but we Radicals nevertheless believe that instead of setting or reintroducing impressive objectives, we should do useful and fair things right now: welfare systems are in urgent need of immediate reform, and for many States constitute, in addition to a serious injustice for future generations, a real time bomb for the sustainability of public finances; we need to liberalise the markets in key sectors such as energy, transport, postal services and the professions; we need to create a truly integrated European financial market; there must be drastic cuts in the burdens weighing down, in particular, small and medium-sized businesses in Europe – tax burdens and bureaucratic burdens in terms of employment regulations – and which are one of the reasons for which a substantial number of European entrepreneurs and microentrepreneurs – I am referring mainly, but not exclusively, to Italy – are driven into the underground economy, a type of economy which evades regulation, which evades legality precisely because of the excessive burdens which are imposed.
This is what should be done, if we want to avoid fooling ourselves with slogans, with magic formulae – formulae put to much use in this Chamber – such as ‘European social model’ or ‘social market economy’. We would do well to ask ourselves whether these models are, today, really capable of protecting society’s most vulnerable, society’s ‘outsiders’."@en1
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