Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-02-13-Speech-1-051-000"
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"en.20120213.15.1-051-000"2
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"Mr President, this is essentially a commercial problem, and if action is needed, then it is a situation crying out to be addressed by the private sector acting in its own commercial interests, under the law. But instead we get this report, which has all the hallmarks of everything which is worst about the EU and the Commission in particular, because it is going to be done using taxpayers’ money.
I thought there was a crisis on. I thought we were living in a time of austerity necessitated by excessive government debt but, as ever, the taxpayer will be required to provide money that he or she can ill afford. The Commission likes to pretend that this will not require any extra resources, but I am more likely to believe that a camel can pass through the eye of a needle. We are creating and extending a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies always set out to justify themselves by showing both the massive scale of the problem and the need for more complex solutions. You can see it in this report and in the proposed legislation. It states facts which can only be conjecture. It is telling that you cannot be precise, or even necessarily in the right ballpark, when assessing grey economic activity.
I do not see any proof that this new extension of the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market will either save EUR 10 billion or 185 000 jobs, yet that is the claim. To paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’ Before I could back any of the proposals such as this, I would require some kind of guarantee that this would work and save the taxpayer money. I do not want to be unkind, but is it not nice for the office to be put in Alicante? You would think that an office like this would be put in an established commercial centre or a place associated with innovation, entrepreneurship and growth, but it is placed on the Costa Blanca. It reminds me of the famous song ‘Oh we do like to live beside the seaside, oh we do like to live beside the sea’ because – come on, let us get real – we are once again seeing taxpayers’ money being thrown at ‘jobs for the boys’ corporatism. Where is the evidence for European consumers and taxpayers that they will be better off? That would be a real impact assessment, not the usual Commission approach of assuming what it seeks to prove.
What we have here is the usual manifestation of the Commission’s proposals, because it will be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It will never, ever, be brought in at a saving to the taxpayer. It will become eventually, as all these things always do, another bureaucratic monster. It is no more than a proto-agency right now but, as ever, it will grow and it will grow. I predict that, sitting there by the Costa Brava beach, the office and its lucky bureaucrats will become bloated on sun, sangria and paella."@en1
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