Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-09-14-Speech-2-104"
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"en.20040914.8.2-104"2
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"Mr President, sixty seconds does not allow me time to go through the budget item by item, so I will concentrate on the total, of which the Council is so proud: 0.99% of GNP. Has there ever been a great human endeavour that took such a wretched figure as its basis? To what ambition do these long speeches testify, when there are reductions here, cutbacks there, and restrictions somewhere else?
Like everyone else in this House, I am of course in favour of budgetary rigour, but that rigour is already subject to the ceilings imposed by the financial perspectives and we are falling short of the current ceilings by some EUR 5 billion. Five billion! Can the Council even begin to imagine what that means? Social needs are beginning to make themselves felt. Could we not alleviate the effects of rapid enlargement on environmental standards? Could a start not be made on transposing the dozens and dozens of directives? Where democracy is concerned – and I am the rapporteur for the Committee on Constitutional Affairs – the Prince programme has been cut into three. There is more. As previous rapporteurs have said, the Council has evidently not heard of such terms as ‘added value’, ‘economy of scale’ or ‘financial synergy’. The Constitution is supposed to be the motor of the EU, but I think it needs some fuel before we tackle this Budget.
If the budget is, without doubt, an accounting exercise, it is equally certain that it is also a political one. I do not get the impression that the Council has grasped that."@en1
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