Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-11-15-Speech-4-029"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20071115.3.4-029"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Madam President, the report somewhat cryptically entitled ‘Social reality stocktaking’ was adopted almost unanimously in the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs – there was only one vote against – and in fact this should come as no surprise. After all, the report’s 97 recommendations amount to calls for assistance for everything and everyone: the poor, women, men, young people, the elderly, the unemployed, low-paid workers, the disabled, those who suffer discrimination, the sick, the healthy of today who may fall ill tomorrow, and so on and so forth.
I could say, with some irony, that the only group omitted from this report is those such as myself: heterosexual, middle-aged white men of right-wing political orientation.
Without irony, however, I would say that there is not a single person in this House who does not agree that the weaker members of our society are entitled to protection and that a civilised society can ultimately be judged on the degree of social protection it affords to people who, for objective reasons, find it difficult to play a normal part in society. Therefore, you would have to be a bad person, as it were, not to support the catalogue of good intentions and social Santa Claus policy contained in this report.
Nevertheless, I shall not be endorsing this report. The fact is that the list of recommendations contains a number of things I cannot support, particularly with regard to immigration policy, integration and diversity, and also the lack of essential protection of family policy. The main reason I cannot endorse this report is much more fundamental, however. Social policy and everything that can be subsumed under the heading ‘social security’ is an outstanding example of a domain of the Member States, and sometimes of their federal states – not of the European Union.
Unless someone in this House has a machine for producing money and resources from thin air, unless such a machine exists, social protection measures still have to be funded from taxpayers’ money. This means that choices have to be made and that, unfortunately, we cannot always play Santa Claus to everything and everyone.
There are essential decisions to be taken that are most fundamental to a whole society, and these decisions must be taken at the lowest possible level, as close as possible to citizens, and not in the ivory towers of Brussels, Luxembourg or Strasbourg.
The experience in my home country, for example, has been that Flemings and Walloons make fundamentally different choices on such matters as health care and their approach to unemployment. The Flemish and Walloon societies are different, their political and economic worlds are different, and therefore they opt for different approaches and priorities. If this is true of Belgium today, how much truer is it
of the very different Member States of the European Union, for example the United Kingdom and Romania?
It would be one thing if this report were only a catalogue of good intentions, but the European institutions have been intending to appropriate the field of social policy for years, and that is not a good thing."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples