Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-04-13-Speech-3-371"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20050413.23.3-371"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
".
Mr President, I rise on behalf of my Group to add my concern to that expressed by previous speakers about this terrible situation in relation to an innovative and, frankly, quite remarkable company in the constituency that Mr Ford and I represent.
Innovia Films is a profitable company, which has developed a process discovered in the United Kingdom in 1898. I suspect that had that process been discovered in Scandinavia in 1998, it would have been viewed as best available technology, plastic packaging would have been banned and cellophane would have been used instead. Sadly, for cellophane, it was discovered rather earlier. However, I welcome the cross-party support that is being shown for the campaign to recognise the problems being caused by the policy of the Americans and to deal with this issue.
This morning we debated the outcome of the European Council meeting held to review the Lisbon Agenda. In the resolution adopted by Parliament with cross-party support, we agreed that there has to be such a thing as industrial policy. If there is industrial policy, then we have to look at how we can support companies like this one. When I wrote to Commissioner Piebalgs on behalf of the company some while ago, in order to see whether any kind of support was available for that company, he replied that there are programmes that support new and innovative systems, but this case would not be eligible for such support. I wonder if we should not be looking again at our industrial policy.
The letter from Commissioner Mandelson to Mel Dando, one of the trade union officers involved, looks at the problems that we have encountered with the policy at the plant in Kansas, as regards declaring a tax holiday and suspending environmental regulations. Mr Mandelson points out that the measures, in the form of tax exemptions, appear to be subsidies but do not fall into the prohibited category. He then goes on to point out that there are no provisions in the WTO agreements that cover environmental dumping and says that, therefore, these measures appear not to be in breach of current WTO rules.
My question to the Commission will be this: if there are no provisions in the WTO agreements that cover environmental dumping, why not? What is the Commission doing to ensure that we have provisions to cover environmental dumping? This incident, affecting, as Mr Ford said, perhaps not a huge number of jobs when viewed on a European scale, but a very large number of jobs when viewed on the scale of a small industrial town like Bridgwater, is one that could be replicated right across the European Union if we found that the policy of different States in the United States of America in this area was about to rob us of jobs in this way.
This is the ugly face of capitalism. We have here a buy-out of a company by a consortium dedicated to asset-stripping and to returning as much money as possible to the investors without looking at the general health of our society and our industries. It is the kind of case on which the Commission should take action. I hope that Commissioner Verheugen, the Commissioner here tonight, and Commissioner Mandelson will raise this case with the Americans and see what we can do to get action to save the plant in Bridgwater and to save potentially many other hundreds of thousands of jobs across the European Union that could be affected by this kind of development."@en1
|
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples