Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-05-20-Speech-2-057"
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"en.20080520.6.2-057"2
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"Mr President, for the past nine years I have sat in the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs alongside my most distinguished UK West Midlands colleague, the current rapporteur Elizabeth Lynne.
Almost without exception we have found ourselves in agreement on pretty well every issue without any need to negotiate compromise amendments because we already had a close meeting of minds.
I suppose to any rule there has to be an exception and to my intense surprise, this report is just that. It is frankly most disappointing that in our view political posturing seems to have got in the way of addressing the real problem.
May I say straight away, before some others on the left get up to their usual distortions, that all of us on the centre-right abhor discrimination in all its forms. All of us on the centre-right want to find practical ways of helping to stamp it out, and indeed would support, in principle, a specific directive to help people with disabilities as currently being considered by the Commission.
But we are very clear that a ‘comprehensive and broad’ EU directive against discrimination which is essentially an open-ended invitation to the Commission to produce yet more ‘one-size fits all’ EU legislation in what is a very sensitive area will do little to address current difficulties and could even be counterproductive. We have tabled our own amendments to reinforce this point.
Whilst some aspects of ongoing discrimination may indeed still be a problem, to suggest that more general EU legislation is somehow a solution is, in our view, way off the mark. Existing EU laws on discrimination continue to prove difficult to implement in practice. There needs to be better implementation of existing laws and better understanding of the problems in implementation before we go down the road of yet more EU directives.
As one UK organisation put it most succinctly last week, most discrimination is not going to be solved by extra legislation. Time would be much better spent on multicultural, multifaith events that change perceptions. We agree with this.
May I thank the Commission for his thoughtful opening remarks and say how much we look forward to the Commission response in due course."@en1
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