Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-12-13-Speech-2-038"
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"en.20051213.6.2-038"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, here we are again, with everyone in this House embracing one another and congratulating themselves and each other on this budget. While this congratulatory reception is going on, though, I have substantial criticisms to make, notably that the second reading in the Committee went ahead without documents, so that resolutions were put together orally, and that the cutbacks and redeployments of funds neither were nor are justifiable. I am quite surprised to see, in the foreign policy sphere, that non-governmental organisations and democracy programmes have gained a great deal, more indeed than they have ever had before, while cutbacks were the order of the day almost everywhere else.
While I am on the subject of cutbacks, the Commission has, in negotiations with the Council and in the Committee on Budgets, proposed to make them, to the tune of over EUR 150 million, to the payments made from the Structural Funds, leaving EUR 70 million. It justified this by reference to an alleged lack of opportunity for implementation in the countries concerned. Looking at the programme of cutbacks, I wonder why it is that the Commission, and the Commissioner, have lost the courage to do the right and proper thing. The present cuts in the internal policy areas and in foreign policy hit hardest those areas in which the money could actually have been put to good use, and this is something of which I really do take a very critical view. We will look carefully to see whether the money remaining in the Structural Funds actually does get spent. What I find regrettable about this sort of thing is that it is yet more evidence of our inability to trust those who administer the funds, and so I ask, as a matter of urgency, that there be no repetition of it, or else we will see a great gulf opening up between old and new, between those countries that contribute and those that receive, and that is precisely what we cannot afford with the financial perspective and the debates on it in the offing."@en1
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