Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-04-20-Speech-2-088"
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"en.20100420.4.2-088"2
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"Mr President, in the Commission work programme for 2010, it was said that the European Union must face up to long-term challenges such as globalisation and must regain competitiveness. The problem is that the EU has not faced up to globalisation: it has embraced it. It is allowing a flood of imports from developing economies with wage rates a fraction of those in Europe. The only way in which we can possibly regain competitiveness would be to drive wage rates down to their levels.
I am not, of course, even in favour of membership of the European Union. However, even if I were in favour of it, I would accuse its masters of betraying the economic interests of its peoples. I would say that the EU is not so much a European Union, as it is a global union trying to achieve the global mobility of all goods and services.
I believe that sovereign nation states should rebuild their manufacturing bases and then protect their markets and the jobs of their nationals. However, my message is also for europhiles. Europe, either as a whole or separately, will fail to protect its manufacturing and its agriculture from Third World competition at its peril. Globalisation must be resisted, individually or collectively, or it will destroy us all.
The Commission’s document refers to the alleged need to develop further legal immigration policies to alleviate the perils of demographic ageing. There is no doubt that ageing populations are a concern in many countries. However, we must examine why the problems occurred. Many women pursue uninterrupted careers and refrain from having children out of choice – and that is their perfect right – but many others pursue careers because it is economically necessary for them. They work in order to pay the bills, not because they have a disdain for motherhood.
There is no doubt that this development has had an impact on birth rates, which have been depressed artificially at the behest of economic forces. However, we do not have to take a laissez-faire approach to economic forces. Economic intervention can change those economic forces and a change in those forces will bring about a corresponding change in family demographics. The idea that we can import large families from the Third World as a substitute for unborn European children is based on a particularly pernicious and wrong-headed assumption, which is that we are the products of nurture and that Third World cultures are like overcoats that can be taken off at the port of entry and replaced with a European cultural overcoat that can be issued with residence and citizenship papers.
The children of such immigrants are allegedly as European as the indigenous population; they are not. Distinctive cultures are made by distinctive peoples and not the other way round. We are not the product of our cultures: our cultures are the products of our peoples. Replacing Europeans with people from the Third World will mean that Europe will be replaced by the Third World. Europe is slowly but steadily being ethnically cleansed of Europeans."@en1
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