Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-07-21-Speech-3-123"
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"en.20040721.6.3-123"2
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"Madam President, in the elections to the European Parliament in June, the turn-out was very low, and Eurosceptic parties had significant successes. Opinion polls show that people’s confidence in the EU and its institutions is declining in the majority of Member States. The legitimacy of the European Union is being progressively undermined. Why is that the case?
There are two important explanations. Firstly, the way in which the EU is developing means that political power is receding ever further from the people. Secondly, people increasingly believe that EU resources are being lost through wastefulness and corruption. The new Swedish party, the June List, which I represent, stood for election on both these issues, and we have been given a powerful political mandate to combat the continued transfer of political power from the Member States to Brussels and to help ensure that European taxpayers’ money is used efficiently and honourably.
The Commission must stop continually going into new areas. We do not want doctors’ working hours to be regulated at EU level. We do not want hunting policy to be worked out at EU level. We do not want a common tax policy or social policy. The ongoing centralisation and bureaucratisation of political power is in actual fact a threat to the future of Europe. Europe’s fantastic economic, scientific and social successes have in large part come about through institutional competition between small political units seeking constructive solutions to issues.
The cradle of Europe was in Ancient Greece with its small city states. Northern Italy’s independent city states during the Renaissance and the host of German states during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided European history with periods of greatness. The Industrial Revolution was begun in an England of only some tens of millions of inhabitants.
The June List calls upon the Commission President to make the term of office that has now begun into an era of political decentralisation in which the institutions of the EU are cleaned up and made more efficient."@en1
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