Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-04-08-Speech-2-310"
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"en.20030408.10.2-310"2
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"Mr President, I want to add my congratulations to Mr Bayona de Perogordo and to thank Commissioner Vitorino for the attention they are drawing to the need for information. Are we mad to be here at this time of night debating this issue? Really, it is the people who are not here who need to understand the importance of explaining what the European Union does. We have to get that message over. If we cannot do that, we must not be too surprised if the citizens of Europe are rather apathetic about it. Many colleagues have mentioned the low turnout at the last European elections – 49% overall, 24% in my country. That is a total disgrace, about which we should hang our heads in shame. The only consolation I have is that the turnout in the last American presidential elections was only 50%. So those of us who believe in democracy have a problem. The solution to that problem is explaining what we do, and that is information policy.
I asked to speak at this ridiculous hour of the night in order to make three simple points. I speak, not just as a Member of the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport, which is interested in information, but also as a Member of the Committee on Petitions. We received a number of petitions from citizens who are not citizens of the national state in which they live. They are entitled to vote in European elections but they found that in the last elections they had all sorts of problems: a British citizen living in Germany said that there are 6 000 non-German nationals entitled to vote in their district, but that only 40 did so because they had inadequate information; a Dutch citizen made exactly the same point in a petition about the situation in France. I am not criticising Germany or France. I am simply saying that if we want people to vote we have to explain the procedures by which they may do so. There is a responsibility upon Member States. They should honour that responsibility and explain to everybody entitled to vote in European elections just how they could do so.
The second point I want to make concerns Euronews. The way people get their information today is through television. There is one channel in Europe that provides European information and yet, I have to tell Parliament that this is a channel that is on the verge. It may succeed – and I hope that it does – and it may not. If people are going to be interested in Europe, they have to know about it. They learn about things through television, and we have to see that Euronews manages to succeed. It seems there is no-one here tonight from the Committee on Budgets, but they are the people who can help make sure that Euronews succeeds.
Thirdly, the Committee on Petitions visited the Danish Parliament last year. The Danish Parliament said that it likes to provide information about Europe from the national parliament rather than from the European Parliament. If we can encourage the national parliaments and national authorities to give more information, then we have some hope. If we do it with a lot of stars, people will say it is only propaganda. So let us encourage the national parliaments to do the job as effectively as the Danes do."@en1
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