Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-02-15-Speech-2-158-000"
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"en.20110215.22.2-158-000"2
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"Madam President, there has been a misunderstanding from the earliest days of the European Union as to what we mean by a free market in goods and services.
When my constituents voted in favour of EEC membership in 1975, they understood the common market to mean mutual product recognition. If you can sell a bottle of mineral water in the UK, you should be allowed to sell the same water in France, Germany or Italy and vice versa. What they found in practice is that it means standardisation – that ‘the mineral water has to contain the following minerals but not any of these’, that ‘the volume must be not greater than x and not less than y’ and so on. You can then find that a product that was never intended for export can be criminalised in its own nation of origin.
That is what we have seen again and again, both with goods and with services. Instead of having an increase of consumer choice, we have a restriction of consumer choice, often driven by one particular producer somewhere in the European Union which happens to meet a load of specifications anyway and which sees EU legislation as the way to export its costs to its competitors. This is why our share of world GDP continues to shrink and how my country has shackled itself to a cramped and confined regional bloc."@en1
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