Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-21-Speech-2-068"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20081021.7.2-068"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
"Mr President, I address my remarks to the President-in-Office of the Council. President Sarkozy, it was your own energy, dynamism and initiative that sent you off to Georgia and Russia to try and broker a deal. You did it off your own bat. You were not acting on behalf of the European Union. It is a delusion if anybody in this place thinks you were. There had been no Council meeting, there was no resolution and there was no mandate. You did it as the French President, and well done to you.
However, if you are proposing that that is the model on which we should decide our foreign affairs in the future – the idea that a permanent president or a permanent foreign minister decides on the hoof what the foreign policy of all of us should be and goes off and does this without reference to national governments and national parliaments – the answer has to be: No, thank you very much indeed.
As far as the financial crisis is concerned, I am delighted that your original plan that everybody should club their money together in the middle fell to pieces. It was a good thing that the Irish, Greeks and Germans went off and acted in their own national interests. What happened at the summit was more a case of nation states agreeing with each other – which is fine and which I am happy with.
I have not heard anybody today recognise that this financial crisis is as much as anything else a failure of regulation. We have not had a lack of regulation: out of the financial services action plan for the last 10 years we have had a blizzard of regulation. It has damaged the competitiveness of places like London and it has not protected a single investor. So please, more regulation is not the answer. We need to rethink what we have been doing.
I think we need to start acting in our own national interest. The fact that our banks cannot pay dividends for the next five years, whereas the Swiss banks can, is something that proves that if you have the flexibility and adaptability of being outside the European Union you can weather financial crises far better than being stuck in the middle."@en1
|
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata | |
| lpv:videoURI |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples