Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-11-18-Speech-4-047"
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"en.20041118.6.4-047"2
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".
Thank you, Mr President.
Mr Barroso, you and your team have shown a willingness to listen to the concerns of this Parliament. I hope and believe that will continue. Likewise, your responsibilities and duties under the Treaties are important. Occasionally you will have to stand up and not give in to every demand from governments or this Parliament. It is only when we have that kind of interinstitutional friction that we will truly achieve the best results.
I welcome this Commission. Most of our group will support it, as indeed most of Parliament will support it. We ask for fair play in return for that support.
As was saying, it is important that we reflect on what has taken place.
Firstly, I would have welcomed the opportunity during the last part-session to have voted on the composition of the Commission as it was presented to us at that juncture. Unfortunately, a majority in this Parliament convinced others that the vote should not go ahead. However, the Council and the Commission have responded to the concerns which Parliament raised and brought forward a new proposal and a new team, which we now have the responsibility to endorse.
In no way would I disallow any Member' right to express a negative opinion on individual members of the Commission. However, it is important and incumbent upon us to ensure that Members of this Parliament do not use Parliament to fight domestic political battles with governments they do not ideologically agree with. It denigrates this House and its Members when we refuse to allow people to hold opinions that we may not agree with. If anything, Europe should be about defending freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of ideas, even though we may not agree with those ideas or thoughts.
Once the dust has settled, the people of Europe will not be judging us on the agility of political groupings within this Parliament or on whether we can get one over on another institution. They will not judge us on whether Parliament is stronger than the Council or equal to the Council or the Commission. They will not judge us on who we stopped from becoming a Commissioner. They will judge us and the Commission on the basis of what we can deliver to the people of Europe.
It is time to stop the political games and get on with the real agenda of making the Lisbon Strategy work, of ensuring that the people of Europe have better access to better-quality jobs and better-quality opportunities and of promoting Europe's role on the wider stage. In six months' time the people of Europe will not know who the individual Commissioners that we rejected were. What they will be asking, however, is what Europe did about Darfur, what Europe did about the Ivory Coast and what Europe did to help the people most marginalised within our society.
Within this House we have a voice. We are elected to use that voice to speak on behalf of the people who put us here to be their representatives. But who will speak for the lonely and the unfairly treated? If not us, then who? Who will speak for the downtrodden and the oppressed? If not us, then who? Who will give us the right to speak on behalf of all of those people if we use our time and energy trying to get one over on a neo-Liberal, neo-Conservative, Communist – or whatever – approach?
The great thing about this Commission and the European Union is that they have allowed people of different political ideologies to put aside their individual ideologies in order to arrive at a consensus for the common good. We should never start at a consensus, but we should always end with a consensus and compromise."@en1
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