Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-04-13-Speech-3-013"
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"en.20050413.2.3-013"2
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"Mr President, it often seems to fall to the smaller Member States to rescue Europe from the problems created by their larger partners. Mr Juncker, I fear you find yourself once more the victim of high expectations. The European Union is now facing major challenges which will test not only its capacity to provide for the hopes and needs of its citizens, but its very capacity to hold together.
The challenge which occupied the European Council is that of re-energising our economic growth potential. Our economy has stalled since the Lisbon Strategy was launched in 2000; it is almost as if a millennium bug of continental proportions has afflicted our competitiveness and depressed our determination to take tough decisions.
The summit was billed as a relaunch of the ten-year Lisbon Agenda, yet it left Liberals and Democrats with the impression of Europe’s leaders sleepwalking their way forward. The lofty language of the Council conclusions is unsupported by the dignity of disciplined thought. The text was high on rhetoric but low on action. Calls for undertakings to build new competitive factors, for consumers to benefit from new goods and services and for workers to acquire new skills were combined paradoxically with a demand for the Commission to rewrite a key piece of internal market legislation enabling growth in the services sector. The draft services directive can be improved, but it will be done in a serious manner by Parliament and the relevant sectoral council rather than by Heads of State playing to the gallery and pandering to nationalist sentiment.
The European Council conclusions speak of financial perspectives to provide the Union with adequate funds to carry through its policy commitments, especially the Lisbon priorities, yet Member States still call for a restrictive budget in one breath, while tying up foreign spending for seven years in the next breath.
Liberals and Democrats in this House do not share Mr Barroso’s satisfaction with the Spring Summit. Mr Juncker, we offer your presidency two cheers on ‘mission impossible’: your legendary ability to craft compromise has saved the shreds of the Stability and Growth Pact. Yet its loose wording and its get-out clauses send shivers down the spines of orthodox economists and Mr Berlusconi’s use of his new-found flexibility to offer tax breaks ahead of a general election shows the contempt with which irresponsible leaders will treat their eurozone partners.
What has happened to Europe’s leadership? Where is the sense of common purpose? Is it any wonder that French or British citizens show little enthusiasm for a new treaty, when two of our longer serving leaders have abjectly failed to explain and justify the Union to their compatriots? The vacuum in leadership at national and European levels threatens to derail not just the Constitutional Treaty, but the whole project. If the Constitution is not ratified the blame will lie fairly and squarely on those leaders who sacrifice longer term European Unity to short-term national popularity.
President-in-Office, I cannot escape the conclusion that your European People’s Party is failing our Union. You have failed to use your majority in the Council to build a coherent economic strategy at home. You are unable to marshal your troops here to see through our commitment to Bulgaria and Romania, to say nothing of their attitude towards Croatia that we have just heard. We are humiliated abroad when our Union conveniently discards its scruples to secure favoured trading status from totalitarian regimes in Russia or in China; when we turn a blind eye to such suffering in the Sudan; when we are silent in the face of American overreaction, imprisoning our citizens without charge, and denying airspace to our airlines. Under these conditions the European Union does a disservice to its citizens. Europe needs and deserves better."@en1
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