Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-05-07-Speech-3-099"
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"en.20080507.13.3-099"2
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"Madam President, it is a great tribute to the work of Günther Verheugen, Jonathan Evans and others that we are meeting here today to follow up this really important initiative.
I particularly want to pay tribute to Mr Evans for his political leadership because I think that political and parliamentary component has been absolutely crucial.
I had the privilege of going to Washington for the first time with the delegation of the Internal Market Committee last year when we were able to go to Congress and to emphasise the fact that engagement with these issues was widely spread across Parliament.
Also, I want to record that we were privileged recently in the Internal Market Committee to have a visit from Nancy Nord, acting chairman of the Consumer Products Safety Committee. That resulted directly from our visit to Washington and it shows, I think, that we are now grasping the political dimension.
Now, why do we need to grasp that political dimension? The answer is because the work on technical product-safety issues and harmonisation issues in particular does have to have a political dimension. The problem lies at a bureaucratic level. If we take motorcars that Mr von Wogau talked about earlier on, the problem there is actually that the experts in the European Union and the experts in the United States
not the politicians
are still failing to agree on fundamental issues like emission standards for heavy trucks or how we test cars for safety.
Those are not political issues. They are issues that bureaucrats are failing to agree on. I think we need to get to grips with that because it is actually costing all of us large amounts of unnecessary money that we should be spending and investing on making safer and greener products for consumers. That is what it is all about in the end.
I know I can count on you, Commissioner, with your political leadership to deal with that, but I think we all need to be engaged in that process, not to make those detailed decisions but to say to the people involved: get together and step up those efforts, because we all want you to succeed."@en1
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