Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2015-05-20-Speech-3-170-000"
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"en.20150520.24.3-170-000"2
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"Mr President, we are all familiar with the arguments against this monthly peregrination between Brussels and Strasbourg. I am not planning to rehearse them again. I would rather hold up this meeting here as a symbol of the immobilism – the resistance to change – that all bureaucracies evolve over time. In fact, if you want a perfect physical symbol of what Milton Friedman calls the tyranny of the status quo, think of the trunks outside our offices. They date from a pre—e—mail age when it was necessary to move paperwork back and forth. Why do we still have them? Because an industry has grown up around their transportation: the lorry drivers, the removal men, and so on. What we see is that the European Union exists primarily for the benefit of its own employees, and that is why it is, in practice, impossible for a government fundamentally to reform the deal in Brussels. This is the classic tyranny of the status quo: it is why the British Government is making such paltry and unambitious demands. We know that, whatever we say, whatever our citizens believe, the system will continue to exist for the benefit of those lucky enough to be employed by it."@en1
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