Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-02-17-Speech-4-136"
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"en.20000217.5.4-136"2
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"Mr President, last month in the UK, in a region that neighbours mine, the Michelin Group announced significant redundancies at its Stoke-on-Trent plant due to company restructuring and increasing global competitiveness in the world market for tyres. I, like all Members present, am saddened by this loss of jobs. Equally, I am saddened by the announcement made by Goodyear that has prompted this resolution. But I doubt very much indeed whether a European works council would have been able to change this company’s decision.
This House is very good at producing resolutions and legislation and we sometimes, in this institution, forget that Europe cannot survive alone. We need multinational companies to base their businesses within our continent. In my few months here, I have found it astonishing that whilst we all talk about the need to encourage businesses to grow within the EU, nearly every resolution we pass actually encourages businesses to leave.
In our last plenary part-session in Brussels we voted on the end-of-life vehicles directive and managed to make the legislation retrospective, adding huge costs for the European motor manufacturers that they could not have predicted. Two days later, Toyota, which employs several thousand people in my region, stated that this directive would not only increase the cost of cars but could well also mean redundancies in their Derbyshire plant.
In a world where surely less regulation is the key, we in this House seem to believe that we can add more regulation and costs on business and that they will stay within the European Union, untempted by other locations elsewhere where there are fewer burdens. We MEPs speak often about SMEs and have now come up with a unique way of creating them. Take a large successful business, add European regulations, and within months you have created a small one. Perhaps before we criticise anybody outside this place we should take a good look at ourselves and what we do here."@en1
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