Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-06-16-Speech-3-015"
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"en.20100616.4.3-015"2
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"Mr President, there is an old story: a man is lost trying to find a railway station. He goes up to someone in the street and says, ‘Where is the station?’ To which the person replies, ‘The route is difficult, the journey is long, so I would not start from here if I were you’.
In all these lengthy discussions about how to avoid a future euro crisis, we are diverting vital energy from the task at hand about how to get out of a current crisis. All this talk about European economic governance, new rules and regulations and further sanctions misses the rather simple and fundamental point: what about now? We have to start from where we are, now. We want the euro to continue to be a success, especially for those who have chosen to be members, but this requires action today and not grand schemes for the future.
It is obviously true, as is now recognised on all sides of this House, that there were serious weaknesses in the design of the currency, but the flaws in its design have been matched by even more serious weaknesses in implementation, which may not be solved by just drawing up new rules. After all, there was insufficient will to enforce the rules that had been put in place in the first place. There was a failure by some Member States to fulfil the commitments that they had undertaken. Yet nothing can be more dangerous for the European Union than to believe that the solutions to our problems involve more regulation, further centralised control and greater burdens. We need to get back to the real concerns of our citizens, above all, how to rebuild Europe’s fragile economy.
Our economic position has suffered three grievous blows in recent years. Firstly, even before the current crisis, we were actually growing more slowly than our major trading partners. We were becoming steadily less competitive in global markets, jobs were being exported and markets undercut. We may have felt prosperous but it was a tragic illusion based largely on money borrowed both by the public sector and private households. Secondly, when the crisis came, it rocked the Western world and caused instability, forcing governments to borrow even more, and thirdly, this excessive borrowing in a number of key members of the euro area brought it to the edge of disaster. Our Member States and our citizens are drenched in debt from which it will take years to recover and most of the difficult steps needed can only be taken by Member States themselves.
The European Union can help; that is why we must not let the Europe 2020 strategy be overshadowed by more grand debates about economic governance. We welcome, Mr Barroso, your work on that strategy. The centrepiece initiative of the Commission is still work in progress but it needs to have full support not to see the mistakes of the Lisbon Strategy being repeated. Avoiding the temptation to become distracted by theoretic debates about future economic governance. We must instead focus on the enormous programme of European reform which is needed to release the creative energy and talents of our people to develop their plans and businesses, which alone can deliver the long-term economic prosperity we seek in an increasingly competitive world."@en1
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