Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-04-05-Speech-3-028"
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"en.20060405.4.3-028"2
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".
Mr President, the cynics in Liberal Democrat ranks would say of last month’s Council that it could have been worse. Congratulations to the Austrians for avoiding a row. The Presidency conclusions were, as so often, pledges of economic reform in directly inverse proportion to acts of economic reform. But the optimists among our number note that the tone of these Presidency conclusions is different. As Mark Twain said of Wagner’s music: ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds.’ Even socialist prime ministers have accepted that the game is up, that the market has to come in to give us growth and prosperity. All Council members accepted that environment policy can make an important contribution to jobs and growth.
If the Italians vote wisely on Sunday there will be a pro-European government in Rome and perhaps it can work together with the new government in Berlin to re-establish the equilibrium that we need in our Union and start to put Europe back on an even keel.
We are making progress and, combined with the prospect of an interinstitutional agreement on the financial perspectives and the economic growth that we now foresee, there is hope again for our Union. I welcome in particular the Commission’s decision this week to mount legal challenges to those flouting the rules of liberalisation, because that is the kind of action that we need from the Commission to make progress.
The European Union is remarkably resilient. Progress may not be made in one area, but it springs up somewhere else: an energy policy for Europe, a good step forward; or more countries wanting to join the eurozone. The drive for common endeavour may come now from the challenges from outwith, rather than conviction from within. But I hope that the Austrian Presidency and the Finnish Presidency that follows it can take this new spirit forward and help us to reconstruct a constitutional basis on which to build our Union for the future.
My Group believes it is time to drop the focus of the spring Council on economic reform. You need three Councils a year. You need to discuss other issues – important issues such as Belarus. You could have discussed, as proposed by some Member States, the issue of Guantánamo Bay, where EU residents are still kept. An unwillingness to upset the Americans prevented you from doing so. Let us see a bit more European spirit coming out of these Councils.
Let us start to rebuild the Union with the active involvement of Member States. Too often in recent years we have seen in Rome, in Paris, in London and even in Berlin attempts to unpick the Community method, to pull Europe apart at the seams – national capitals that risk enhancing global anarchy in the name of preserving national sovereignty.
I was very surprised to see you, Mr Schüssel and Mr Poettering, and all of the glitterati of the European People’s Party in Rome, supporting the re-election campaign of a Prime Minister who has undermined Europe’s values at every turn ...
frustrating progress in judicial cooperation, even judicial proceedings; overstepping the borders of propriety, of a free and independent media, or even of electoral systems; using the Presidency of the EU to embrace Vladimir Putin, ignoring Russia’s actions in Chechnya. The European People’s Party claims to be pro-European. That is hardly the action of a pro-European party."@en1
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