Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-04-06-Speech-3-024-000"
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"en.20110406.4.3-024-000"2
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"Mr President, that means that I can cut a minute or two into Mr Lehne’s speaking time. I would like to thank the Commissioner and everyone else for the discussion we have been having here. However, I have not noticed any mention of a couple of matters which are, in my view, extremely important and which I have included in the report. I hope that the Commissioner will assist us in making these a reality.
We have been praising Professor Monti to the skies, but his conclusion was that the transposition of the directive is the major problem affecting the internal market. He says that we need to work with regulations more. My own take on this is that less is more; let us have less legislation from Europe. Whatever we actually do, however, it must be done in a uniform fashion, because we need to prevent the 27 Member States becoming a hotch-potch of states which all transpose legislation in different ways, which creates a huge barrier for small and medium-sized enterprises in terms of working across borders.
Another thing which has been overlooked, Mr President – and which is perhaps our greatest failure of all – is the matter of marketing. We have top lawyers here. We are creating great laws. We believe that it is incumbent on us to improve the market for our citizens. However, the citizens themselves do not seem to be aware of that. We actually have a problem in that we are unable to build a bridge between us and them. We are adept at legal terminology, but we do not appear to be good at communicating directly with our citizens. What is in danger of happening – and I hope that will not be the case – is that we, as the European Union, might drift further and further apart from the citizens of Europe. I think that, over the coming years, we really need to focus on and invest in ways of seeking the support of individual citizens for the European Union and for what we are doing. There is a lot to be done on that score, and I think that we need to invest in that and that we ought to consult our communication advisers on how we can best achieve that.
Finally, it has struck me that our citizens do not know the difference between the European Commission, Parliament and the Council. In each Member State, we have three representatives whose hands are ultimately tied, because they work for official organisations. If Member States express negative views of the European Union, there is no one to parry that. I think that it would make sense to consider having a single EU representative in Member States – call it an ambassador, if you like – who could ultimately respond to any negative pronouncements about the European Union. If we do that, it will prevent us from becoming like the Titanic. On the Titanic, everyone thought that things were absolutely fine, but ultimately the real danger lay outside."@en1
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