Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-21-Speech-1-088"

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"Madam President, Mr President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, I believe that you in the Commission and we in Parliament – or at least the vast majority of Members of this House – want to win hearts and minds for the project of European integration. If that is what we want, we must offer citizens real substance, and explain the importance of that substance. In our view, a social Europe should be the priority. In order to achieve a social Europe, however, we need jobs. For jobs we need growth, and for growth we need both investment and, first and foremost, education, training and lifelong learning, and – yes, Mr Kirkhope – we need greater flexibility too. Anyone calling for flexibility, however, must know that flexibility and social security are not mutually exclusive; as the Nordic model has shown, the public is in fact willing to accept a greater degree of flexibility if a social safety net is in place and if there are also, for example, extensive opportunities for further training to enable people to cope with the implications of this flexibility, including its social implications. We also need effective public services. Your statement, Mr President, did not entirely satisfy me, because the question of services cannot be reduced to market economics. Our public services are part of our own identity; whether they be postal services or local transport, they are part of the European identity, which the people of Europe rightly want to see defended. This is therefore not a purely economic matter, but a profoundly emotive issue too. One final point: what Vice-President Wallström did very recently with regard to the rights of air passengers was a very positive step, in my opinion. The fact is that we must go public and tell people what we have achieved in this Parliament, including our responses to proposals from the Commission. We must tell them that we are here for them, which is why I ask you not to approach legislative measures from an exclusively technical perspective as a means of creating better regulations, but always to think of the people for whom we make these laws and to whom we wish to communicate them. If the Commission and the European Parliament can pursue this approach together in future, we shall win many, many hearts and minds for this European Union of ours."@en1

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