Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-10-21-Speech-2-149"
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"en.20031021.5.2-149"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, members of the Council Presidency, ladies and gentlemen, the Budget resolutions are about setting down in figures the policy that one wants to implement; it is about turning one’s own political priorities into a proper structure of figures that will stand up. This year, my group, that of the Party of European Socialists, has again been successful in playing its part in this. We agreed, early on in the year 2000, that we would make Europe into the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economic area in the world, with qualified full employment and greater social cohesion. This, the Lisbon objective, is our guiding star, and we must not lose sight of it even when we are fighting over the many minor lines in the Budget. It is precisely there, among these rather minor lines, that we find expenditure on our action plans, ‘
Europe 2002’ and its offshoot, ‘
Europe 2005’, which are meant to prevent regions and people from being left behind by the headlong developments in our information society. In this regard, it is also important that we should have sufficient funds available to be able to promptly and effectively integrate the new information and communications technologies into Europe’s education and training systems.
Not only does
Learning, a multiannual programme, work towards social cohesion and towards bridging the digital divide, but it also improves opportunities for lifelong learning and enhances the European dimension in education, and that is something we need. We need people to be innovative and mobile, people who are capable of putting the new technologies to work in innovative production processes. Innovation creates new jobs, most frequently in small and medium-sized enterprises, support for which needs to be further stepped up. We know that small and medium-sized enterprises employ over half the EU’s workers, that they produce something like half the total turnover in the European Union, and that they are innovative and geared towards growth. All this adds up to sufficient reason for a Social Democrat like myself to keep harping on about the importance of support for SMEs, whether this be by implementing the lines for action from the Charter for Small Enterprises, by helping SMEs to put new technologies to good use, or by improving their financial environment. In all this, we have to pay particular attention to the very small firms, the micro-enterprises, even though the Commission is proving to be a bit clumsy about this. The fact is that they make up the majority of our businesses. Our average SME employs five people. From this moment on, we need to make greater efforts towards achieving the targets we set ourselves in Lisbon, indeed much greater efforts in view of our having twenty-five, rather than only fifteen, Member States, from May next year."@en1
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