Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-07-Speech-4-016"
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"en.20070607.3.4-016"2
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".
Madam President, the President-in-Office of the Council quoted the German Council Presidency’s slogan about Europe succeeding together, but I now find myself wondering: together with whom? The primary objective was to draw up a roadmap for the further progress of the constitutional process; since we debated the substance of this yesterday, and my group rejected it, I can save myself the bother of talking about it now, but if one compares what has been said over the last few months about strategy – with some wanting to leave the text as it is despite its having been rejected by two countries, some wanting a bit more and others a bit less, some wanting it more about the internal market and others more about social Europe – people are not singing from the same hymn sheet, and so far they have been missing the mark.
A lot has been said recently about solidarity in the ‘Europaforum’ broadcast on WDR, about solidarity as the principle on which the European Union is founded and on which basis it should continue to develop, and quite right too, but the only trouble is that the Council’s policy does not tally with that, for it has continued the trend sketched out by the Lisbon Strategy, with more and more areas of life being defined in economic terms and required to be restructured in line with an open market economy with free competition, and the application of criteria derived from management rather than from economics. Examples of this include the liberalisation of postal services, the Services Directive, the Health Directive and the Green Paper on labour law. Whilst politicians are tending more and more to deny themselves the chance to exercise influence over the course of events, your Presidency of the Council is pushing ahead with Europe-wide regulations that I regard as assaults on citizens and on their human rights, two examples of which are: the storage of air passengers’ personal data and the widespread introduction of the collection of biometric data for the purpose of the visa information system in the continuing absence of a single European system for data protection, and this is now being extended into the realm of foreign policy.
More has been done over recent months to implement the ‘Global Europe’ strategy for a competitive Europe, which is primarily concerned with market access for European businesses, rather than with fair trade, and there are more examples of that, such as the pressure for the tightening up of patent law, free trade agreements rather than cooperation agreements, economic partnerships instead of development aid, all at the same time as Mode 4 of GATS is being categorically nullified, thus affecting workers’ freedom of movement.
What I have to say about the G8 Summit is that it might well be legitimate for Heads of Government to get together privately for a barbeque and debate the future of the European Union and other weighty matters, but the goals being negotiated there by individual major EU Member States on the one hand and other economic forces on the other are being laid down in such a way that it would appear that they have to be put into effect on a worldwide scale, yet not even the 27 Member States of the European Union agree among themselves in this way. The decisions taken there are legitimised by nothing; hence, then, the audible and justified protest, to which attention must therefore be given, although I want to make it perfectly clear that we disassociate ourselves from all violence committed by whatever side."@en1
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