Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-24-Speech-2-343"
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"en.20090324.28.2-343"2
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"Mr President, Mr Barrot, Mr Brown, as you reminded us, 20 years ago the Berlin Wall fell, putting an end once and for all to the model which it embodied and which, in any case, had already been dying for some time.
This speaks volumes of the nature of the challenges of our times.
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In these circumstances the temptation to give unbridled capitalism full rein was too great. The European Union has followed others in succumbing to this temptation. The fathers of this new model or their successors have today been overtaken by their now unmanageable creature. In order to get through what is also an existential crisis, we first have to dare to question. I do not get the impression that we are on such a path.
At the last European Council, the President of the Commission said that we were equal to the situation. The President-in-Office of the Council said that he was highly satisfied with the results obtained, while the first prize went, as it often does, to Mr Berlusconi, for whom the European Union is a healthy body hit by a virus. Time will tell.
So far, the rare voices of self-criticism have come from economic circles themselves, such as that of the chairman of Morgan Stanley in Asia, who said that we are all responsible: the financial institutions, the regulators, the rating agencies, the boards of directors, the politicians and the central banks, and that we need to accept all this collectively. That is what will change us.
I think, Prime Minister, that you are the first European political leader to have taken your turn in sketching a
. It related to the attitude which you adopted 10 years ago following the Asian crisis: an attitude which you today consider was insufficiently firm towards those who thought that these were passing problems.
The old idea that markets were efficient and could regulate themselves is over, you said. I must say that I prefer this gesture of humility to the less-than-adequate speech given in this very House by your predecessor in a previous life.
However, I am convinced that the problem lies elsewhere. As stated in the recent report by the secretariat of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, we need to shut down the big casino. The doctrine applied over the last 20 years has failed spectacularly.
That is why those who pompously announced the G20 as a new Bretton Woods at which capitalism would be recast or even moralised have deceived our fellow citizens. There will be no ‘eve of the revolution’ in London on 2 April.
Unit, a large trade union in your country has, I think, found a very simple and accurate phrase to say where the shoe pinches. Its slogan for the march organised next Saturday in the British capital will be, and I quote, ‘Put people first’. It may seem obvious, but it verges on a Copernican Revolution in comparison with what has become the dominant system."@en1
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