Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-09-12-Speech-3-024-000"
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"en.20120912.4.3-024-000"2
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"Mr President, two weeks ago I was privileged to be with Mr Daul and others from this House in Tampa, where Mitt Romney told the Republican National Convention: ‘I wish President Obama had succeeded because I want America to succeed, but his promises gave way to disappointment and division’.
So surely the only other alternative is for some countries to leave the euro, to devalue their currencies and for us to support them as they find the right policies that will return them to sustainable public spending and growth in the long-term. The euro area needs to be restructured, and I do not say that with delight, Mr Barroso. I say it because I think it is the only realistic course of action that will deliver for people who are desperate for a solution.
The EU faces a crisis of leadership. Mr Barroso told us so himself last year in the State of the Union address, and I agree with him in that particular case. The EU does face a crisis of leadership. It needs a leadership that faces the economic reality of the euro crisis and does not keep avoiding the problem. We need new leadership that respects our nation states as building blocks of democracy which should be supported and not undermined.
We take away people’s right to control their destiny through the ballot box at our peril. Already frustrated, angry and fearful people are toying with extremist forces and the alarm bells should be ringing. On that point, and on that point alone, I agree with Mr Cohn-Bendit.
We need a new leadership which will tackle Europe’s fundamental competitiveness crisis in the wider global economy and which will pursue a new direction to relaunch growth along the lines outlined by 12 EU prime ministers in their letter in February.
In America, Governor Romney has set out a plan for how he would renew America by returning it to a land of personal ambition, enterprise and freedom. In the EU we come from the same traditions and we are at our best when government is small, when markets are free and when the people exercise control over their government.
Mr Barroso, I still hope that, as you prepare your work programme for next year, it is not too late for you to shake off the policies of the past and to champion genuine reform of the EU so that it can become relevant to today’s reality and help us to succeed in facing the difficult years ahead.
I wish to say to President Barroso: my group supported you for a second term. We wanted you to succeed in shaping a positive agenda for reform of the EU. In some areas, such as international trade or the single market, your Commission has made some progress which we welcome, and we welcome your further announcements today of progress on the single market. But overall I have to say we are very disappointed. Rather than seeing European renewal, as you yet again promised last year, all we have seen is the same old tired approach: more Europe rather than better Europe.
Exactly two years ago the main initiative to emerge from your State of the Union speech was project bonds. Two years on, nothing has happened, they are merely at a pilot phase. Last year your big idea was an EU-wide financial transactions tax, and today thankfully that idea is dead in the water. This year we have a banking union, we have more Treaty change – the knee-jerk reflex of the European elite to every crisis. You told us today that we have the power to shape the world. Mr Barroso, can I suggest that first of all you concentrate on solving the problems of Europe before you worry about shaping the rest of the world?
And so far, the response to the euro zone crisis has been characterised by seeking short-term, sticking-plaster solutions and long-term institutional navel-gazing. Listening to you today it looks as though that is going to continue. Bail-outs – ECB Ponzi schemes – have enabled you to kick the infamous can even further down the road, and last week’s ECB decision to buy up bonds may be, as some Members have said, a useful stop-gap, but it is in no sense a solution. Risks have simply been transferred from one balance sheet to another.
The essential nonsense of this current approach was for me brilliantly illustrated over the summer. If you remember, Greece had to repay a EUR 5 billion loan to the ECB, so to do this they issued new short-term bonds. All of these bonds were bought by Greek banks. Those Greek banks are, of course, all technically bust. So where did they get the money from? They borrowed it from the ECB to pay the Greek state who then gave it back to the ECB again.
Mr President, this is exactly the kind of financial chicanery which caused the economic crisis in the first place, and now you want us to have another long drawn-out academic debate about more Treaty change, about a banking union. We will scrutinise your proposals very carefully to make sure that they respect the rights of those Member States that thankfully chose not to join the euro. We wish to maintain the integrity of the single market and ensure that your proposals do not damage that market.
The euro was, of course, a political project from the start. I well remember the many debates in this House we had about it, where the political symbolism was much more important than the economic reality. I bet many of you are regretting that now. Well, President, we are now in an economic crisis and it will be solved with economic solutions, by confronting some fairly stark economic truths.
It is a reality – and Members have referred to this, Mr Barroso referred to this – that some euro zone countries are less competitive than others. For them, the euro is acting like a straitjacket, preventing the currency devaluation that would give them time to put in place longer-term reforms. And to illustrate how urgent the problem is, I agree with Mr Swoboda, a new report from the ILO shows that Spain now has the highest documented unemployment rate in the world. Greece unfortunately comes second. This is misery on an epic scale in those countries, and we really should do something about it. So let us be honest about it. Let us be honest with ourselves.
The only way that the euro can be made to work with 17 members is if the people of Germany, the people of the Netherlands, the people of Finland, are prepared to transfer cash – not loans, cash – from their taxpayers’ pockets in order to bridge the competitiveness gap. Now I do not think that is ever going to happen and the people of those countries deserve our understanding of why that is not possible."@en1
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