Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-02-14-Speech-2-187"
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"en.20060214.26.2-187"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I will begin with a word of thanks to our colleague Mrs Gebhardt, who will, I hope, on Thursday see her ordeal, which has lasted weeks, brought at last to a happy conclusion. I will also express my gratitude to Mr Harbour, who can no doubt look back on even tougher weeks, to whom I wish an equally successful conclusion. Returning to my own group, I also wish to thank Mrs van Lancker, who has made her contribution to our labours under the most difficult of circumstances.
We hear there the sound of dissent, but I can tell Mr Langen that the PPE-DE’s minorities generally express their views forthrightly. That we do know!
There is, though, underlying what we are discussing here today and what we will be deciding on Thursday, a message for the institutions; Mr Bartenstein has got the message, and so has Mr Barroso. Both of them have grasped – and let me stress that it is a good thing that they have – that, irrespective of what fundamental decisions they try to take, decisions that will determine the future direction of the European Union, there is no getting round the European Parliament.
Just as the Council failed in its attempt to foist upon us a Commission that we did not want, so, too, it will fail with its ill-advised Financial Perspective. The Council has had to take note of the fact that it was Parliament that adopted a proper and balanced chemicals policy. It was Parliament that kept the enlargement debate on rational lines and did not allow it to be carried along in a rush, and, on this occasion, it is Parliament that is showing the other two institutions that it is possible to do what my own country’s late President, Johannes Rau, called for in almost every speech, namely to be the protector that the little man must have in a deregulated world.
The big multinationals can hold their own in global competition, but the ordinary citizens of Europe – workers in ports and factories lorry drivers in their vehicles, those who work for the postal services or on the railways, artisan craftsmen in their workshops and nurses in hospitals – need protection in this struggle for what we call the European social model. They do not have shareholder value on their side; they need someone to defend their rights in a deregulated Europe, and that someone is, today, the European Parliament, and it is to be hoped that it will do so by an overwhelming majority on Thursday.
This directive is the most controversial and contentious draft to come up for debate in recent years, and rightly so, for it has to do with the question of what social model we want in Europe – no more and no less than that – and we will be giving the answer to that question this week. What is plain to us European Social Democrats is that every one of the economic and technical advances that we can point to as the successes of the second half of the twentieth century went hand in hand with raised incomes, more social security, more environmental rights, greater protection for consumers. That is what we mean when we talk about our social model. What Frits Bolkestein was aiming to do was to create growth on the assumption of less income, less social security, fewer environmental standards and less protection for consumers, and it is precisely that that we are putting a stop to today. From today, ‘Bolkestein’ is no more. That is the first piece of good news to come out of this debate.
The second point that must be central to our debate is that Europe will not allow itself to be divided. In both the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats and our own group, it has become clear that the attempt to divide us, inherent in this Bolkestein directive, has been fought off. Bolkestein’s philosophy was that those who earn less and have lower standards should be given free access to the market so as to achieve a downward adjustment where wages and standards are high. That was an attempt at playing the new Member States off against the old ones, setting Old Europe and New Europe at odds with one another. Here in this House, we can show that the attempt to do so has failed. In my own Group just as much as in the PPE-DE, delegations from the old and new Member States are working together to solve this problem. That is another item of today’s good news.
There is also a third message about which we should harbour no misconceptions: many have attempted to use this services directive to promote their own interests and fashion the European internal market in the image of their own liberal-purist thinking. I am pretty certain that what I have described is what Mr Bolkestein wanted. I did get the impression that, for a time, that was what Commissioner McCreevy wanted as well, but, in the light of the real balance of power, of which he will get written evidence on Thursday, he has come to see reason.
It was thus with a great deal of interest that we heard that you – Mr Barroso and Mr McCreevy – wanted to base your future actions on what comes out of this House’s deliberations, for it is quite clear that a broad majority is forming itself in this House in favour of a new services directive, a services directive founded on the idea that free market access should be guaranteed subject to the condition that services should be subject to the laws of the country in which they are rendered. The consequence of that is that the rights in relation to social security, wages, the environment and consumers that have been built up in the Member States will be maintained, that it is on that basis that these services are rendered, and it is precisely that that we have achieved. We have, so to speak, turned ‘Bolkestein’ round to face in the right direction, and the attack by those who wanted the opposite has thereby been thwarted.
If I may spell it out in plain language, that means – and I am speaking for my group when I say this – that those who want to alter the European social model or destroy it will meet with determined resistance from Europe’s Socialists. It is a good thing, too, that they are evidently meeting with determined resistance from a substantial section of Europe’s Christian Social movement, and we are glad to see it."@en1
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