Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-16-Speech-4-039"
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"en.20061116.3.4-039"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, the communications White Paper, on which we are to vote today, is an example of how you can turn anything into a science and learn some thoroughly interesting things, but, if your house is on fire, what you really have to do if you do not want the place to burn down is – rather than philosophising about fire – to locate the source of the fire, cut it off, and grab a fire extinguisher.
The EU has a massive communications problem and a bad image. The worst thing that the public accuse us of is that we are over-bureaucratic, with laws that are too divorced from reality and that bring them no benefit. That is not, of course, true, but it is in that very area that we have to get the message across, and that we often fail to do.
The latest example of this was the EU’s safety regulations relating to hand luggage on aircraft. Listen to members of the public talking about this at an airport, and you will get some idea of just how worked up they get about this, but they see the villain as being Brussels rather than Osama bin Laden or some other terrorist figure. It is we who are blamed for their no longer being able to take even a bottle of water on board with them, and we who are mocked when we insist on 100 ml containers, even though such containers are available nowhere in the EU’s single market.
Now, since it was the Commission that drafted this secret legislation, I will ask them just what they did to improve the way in which this was communicated; did they distribute leaflets to every passenger, asking them for their forbearance? If they did, I heard nothing of it. Did they put all their trust in media reports? That is not enough; what you have to do is address the public directly, for you are interfering directly in their lives, and, since it is their freedoms that you are restricting by means of these security rules, you have to come up with some very good arguments in favour of them. That is what communication is about.
We have now spent two and a half years working at improving communications, but all that has emerged has been intellectual concepts – the very antithesis of efficient communication – so let us be more practical, more down-to-earth, and, instead of making communication into an abstract science, let us simply see it as what it is, namely a tool, rather like a fire extinguisher when something is burning."@en1
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