Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-16-Speech-2-153"
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"en.20031216.4.2-153"2
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"Mr President, ten speeches ago our committee chairman, Mr Wynn, said that everything that was important had been said.
I want to add my voice to those who congratulated Mr Mulder, the chairman of the committee, Mrs Schreyer and the expertise that we have all around us. Look at all the expertise that is involved in this job and I genuinely mean 'expertise' of our assistants in our Groups, the staff of the committee and the Commission and the experts in the Council of Ministers. Then look at what we apply all this expertise to: a game that I have sometimes described as push penny, which was a game played on a window sill or a table using two pennies, a halfpenny and two sets of goals and you push the penny around. I am becoming increasingly disillusioned with this whole budgetary procedure and I tend to see it as a game of push penny. Literally one cent, one per cent of the GDP of the European Union, and what power do we have over it?
The agricultural budget has been given to six or seven million people out of the 400 million people in the Union. It is spread most unfairly: EUR 17 000 per farmer to French farmers, EUR 3 000 per farmer to Portuguese and Greek farmers. But we have to forget about that. The Council puts that there and that has to be financed anyway.
Look at our next big spending: regional policy. What does it do? I come from a country that received generous portions of regional finance early on, but that is not so today. Spain, for example, receives a net transfer of about EUR 200 per capita a half per cent of GDP. If Spain is an example of our policies of solidarity in regional policy, then I say it gets nothing. That half per cent of GDP makes no difference: it is imaginary. Mr Aznar may sell his policy of social economic cohesion. I say we need to look at all this again.
There are so many things we could do without increasing public spending throughout the European Union by transferring some things from national competence to European competence. Development cooperation has to be one of them and research has to be another. We are not going to build a Community and send in regulations to the new countries in Eastern Europe. We are already unpopular. Nobody is questioning the existence of the state. There are a lot of people questioning the existence of Europe. If the budget is to be an instrument of building Europe, we had better start thinking anew."@en1
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