Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-10-23-Speech-2-091-000"
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"en.20121023.5.2-091-000"2
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"Mr President, there were some good things to come out of last week’s Council meeting. For instance, there was the support for the single market of 27 Member States, developing more open trade, the cutting of some red tape and the withdrawal of some pending Commission proposals. These were all good things. However, we need to see more action on all of those initiatives and my group will certainly support Mr Barroso in taking these initiatives forward.
However, when it comes to the main topic of debate – yet again the euro crisis – we can see that the summit manifestly failed to deliver. Both Mr Van Rompuy and Mr Barroso spoke in this Chamber after the previous summit in June. They spoke about balancing solidarity with responsibility and described the results back then as ‘significant’. They said that these took Europe a few more steps down the road to recovery. Well, of course, over the summer it became clear that some key Member States had had second thoughts about what they agreed then, and the few small steps forward were overwhelmed by some pretty giant leaps backwards.
The only significance of that summit, with hindsight, was that it represented yet another missed opportunity. The window created by the actions of the ECB to enable political leaders to get ahead of the curve in reassuring the markets was lost then, and it is lost now. No amount of fudging over the timetable for the supervisory mechanisms or the carefully chosen words about mutual support can cover up for the fact that this summit simply backtracked on what had been agreed.
I have a lot of sympathy for both Mediterranean Europe and Northern Europe, but we cannot go on with this stalemate, with one side unwilling to hand over budgetary sovereignty and the other side unwilling to hand over its chequebook and its cash. It seems to me that, as Mr Verhofstadt observed, we now have no chance of making any headway towards a solution to the crisis before the elections in Germany. The problem that we face is quite simply one of leadership. To take a topical example that has been mentioned in this debate, when the EU was awarded this famous Nobel Prize, the bickering began immediately about who was going to collect the prize, who was going to make the speech and who was going to talk at the dinner. I started thinking about all of those political leaders and organisations who actually really deserved to collect that prize for delivering peace in Europe, for holding firm during the Cold War and for challenging the might of the Soviet Union. I thought about the contributions of General de Gaulle, President Reagan, Prime Ministers Kohl and Thatcher, NATO, and Pope Jean Paul II. No doubt everyone in this Chamber has some figure that they want to put forward as contributing to that list. It seems to me that they had one thing in common – they had political courage, the courage to stand firm, to take political risks and to make sacrifices for what they believed in.
What a sad contrast to the modern day Europe of today, where difficult decisions are delayed, timetables slip, and political realities are ignored. It was sobering to note that that Nobel Prize was awarded to the EU, not because we are dealing effectively with the current crisis, but because we are failing to do so. It is not a message of congratulations to Europe’s leaders, it is an act of charity. The prize has not been given to the EU because it is strong and doing well. It has been given now because the EU is weak and doing badly. That was made clear in the citation itself – in the announcement – if you read it.
So let us put aside the self-congratulations and let us forget the mutual backstabbing. Let us get on instead with the difficult task of making the urgent decisions that are required to make the European economy competitive and to launch the project again."@en1
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