Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-02-09-Speech-2-021"

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"Mr President, Mr Barroso, your Commission certainly has both strong and weak points. I would like to focus on the strong points. We have a foreign policy team that you would be hard pressed to find anywhere else, with regard to both foreign policy and development policy. Mr Szájer, you cannot deny that we have a better team now than we had at the time of the original hearing of the first candidate from Bulgaria. I also firmly believe that Baroness Ashton will coordinate this team well. The single telephone number that Henry Kissinger allegedly demanded is brought up again and again. Maybe we do not have this single telephone number, but if you make a comparison with the United States – in connection with climate protection, for example – who should we call? President Obama or the Senate, which has so far refused to find a solution? With regard to the issue of disarmament, should we contact President Obama, who is in favour of disarmament, or the Senate, which has not come up with any solutions? Let us not always make ourselves out to be worse than we are! We have an opportunity now to make a good impression. Where economic policy is concerned, we have a strong team. I hope and believe that those of our colleagues in the Commission who did not come across so strongly in the hearings will develop that strength as time goes by. When it comes to social policy, we have a Commissioner who takes matters seriously and a Commission President who has also promised us that he will give priority to social affairs and social policy. We are counting on this. We are not only counting on it, we will also press for it to actually happen. Together, we found solutions for a number of areas in the Framework Agreement. We disagreed sometimes, but we worked well together. It is a very good agreement if we take it seriously – you in the Commission and we in the European Parliament. If we manage to get the Council to take seriously the principles of transparency contained in the agreement, then we really will be able to achieve something magnificent. As a result of the Treaty of Lisbon and the Framework Agreement, from the beginning of the legislative process right through to its end, to implementation, there will be a level of transparency that is perhaps not the case in many national parliaments. I therefore call on the Commission and the Council to take this seriously. In the case of SWIFT, transparency has not been taken seriously – by the Commission or the Council. We now have a Member of the Commission who was responsible for the Council. This is a practice that we in this Parliament can no longer tolerate. The reason for this mess is not that Parliament is likely to be obstinate. Rather, it is because, even during the transition, when it was already clear that this Parliament still had more to say, the Council and the Commission – particularly the Council – did not understand that they had to involve Parliament. That is the bottom line. In this regard, Mr Barroso, with the legislative resolutions and the obligation on the part of the Commission to respond – either with its own draft legislation or with a clear explanation for why it is not going to take action – we have made significant progress. Let us not pretend that the parliamentary right of initiative has always been as significant in the national parliaments. They are essentially dominated by the governments, and what the government proposes is often implemented in the parliaments. This is not the case here. The Commission’s proposals are not yet legislation for us. We work on them so that our own ideas, too, are incorporated. Let us seize this opportunity with the new Commission, a new treaty and a new Framework Agreement. Let us, as Parliament, be confident in our dealings with the Commission."@en1
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