Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-06-15-Speech-2-499"
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"en.20100615.30.2-499"2
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"Madam President, the debates we have been attending in the European Parliament in recent months have been of great importance.
I hope that this does not get stuck as a declaration of intentions, because we cannot let ourselves allow that.
We are setting out nothing more and nothing less than the future of the European Union. For example, we are debating the Europe 2020 strategy to prevent us from falling behind in terms of research, development and innovation, job creation, world competitiveness, and the environment. I would like to know if the Commission and the Council believe that these goals can be achieved without substantially increasing the EU budget, or if we are instead going to once again go no further than making declarations that sound good.
Nor can we forget – and we have already recalled it here – that the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force a few months ago and that, as a result of it, the European External Action Service has been launched, which also has a financial cost; I would like to know how we are going to finance it.
I will give you an example of what I believe we must not do and what I have unfortunately heard here. For example, the Commission has just presented an amending budget to compensate banana-supplying African, Caribbean and Pacific states with EUR 190 million over four years. Do you really believe that meeting this commitment should be at the expense of other types of aid to third countries? Are we really going to finance new commitments by cutting ones that we had previously made?
I believe that the needs are clear and the answers should be so. Nevertheless, just in case, I am going to recall what the Council said when it adopted the current financial framework, and I am citing the actual text: ‘The increasing pace of globalisation and rapid technological change continues to offer new opportunities and present new challenges. Against this background, the European Council agrees that the EU should carry out a comprehensive reassessment of the financial framework, covering both revenue and expenditure, to sustain modernisation and to enhance it, on an ongoing basis. The European Council therefore invites the Commission to undertake a full, wide-ranging review covering all aspects of EU spending, including the CAP, and of resources, including the UK rebate, to report in 2008/9’.
Well, here we are in mid-2010 and Parliament is having to ask the other two institutions an oral question in order to find out whether or not they are going to meet the commitment that they should have met last year.
It has already been said and could, in a way, be right: we are in a difficult economic situation; we are in an economic crisis in which the majority of countries are cutting their budgets, and it will be thought of as preposterous to ask for more money for the European Union. However, I would like to say two things to you about that.
Firstly, these cuts that EU Member States are making are being made in order to cut the deficit and the budgets of the European Parliament and the EU are not in deficit. In fact, they are not in deficit because this is a requirement of the treaties.
Secondly, and much more importantly, if we really believe in the European project and if we want to carry on being relevant, we must react now. There will be winners and losers and if we do not want to belong to the losers’ group, we must set out a clear and ambitious strategy."@en1
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