Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-29-Speech-3-165"
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"en.20000329.9.3-165"2
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"Mr President, I want to concentrate mainly on the revision and just say to those who have been making comments condemning the Commission on the proposal for taking money from 1A: ‘Let us wait and see what the PDB brings forward’ and not write off everything at this time. Ralf Walter made the very pertinent point that agriculture expenditure will actually increase and if money is taken from 1A it will be from surpluses, but let us wait until the PDB comes along.
We are working on assumptions when we present this report from Mrs Haug. I am just referring to the Haug report not to Mr Ferber’s. I congratulate the pair of them but in this Haug report we make certain assumptions about the revision, about redeployment in Category 4 and about the needs of Kosovo. However, I need to remind the Council – and at least we have one willing scribe down there if no one else is doing the night shift for the Council to get the message across – that really, if the Commission makes the proposal which we expect them to make, then they are duty bound, because of the interinstitutional agreement, to discuss with Parliament what that revision should be before their first reading.
My gut feeling is that there will be no agreement with the Council on getting a revision of the financial perspective. Well, if that is the case, the message needs to go out now loud and clear that we will have the same bumpy ride with the budget this year that we had last year and you will not win. We will be determined to do our best for the Balkans and Kosovo but, at the same time, we will be realistic for those other policies which Parliament considers to be important.
The trouble with the Council is that everything revolves around what was agreed at Berlin. We keep being told that Berlin is set in concrete. Well, in the words of Hugh McMahon who was one of my colleagues up to the last Parliament, in a debate on shipbuilding, he once said, ‘We don’t want it set in concrete, we want it set in runny cement’, and I presume that what we want in this day and age is to have the Berlin Agreement in a type of runny cement so at least you can be flexible enough to agree with us that things have to change.
I make the point, Mr President, as I did yesterday in the Budgets Committee, in the twelve years of the financial perspective there have been 38 revisions totalling over EUR 7 000 billion of monies that have been involved in those revisions. Kosovo is one of those occasions where the financial perspective is not flexible enough and it needs to be changed and that message has to be got through otherwise there will be problems."@en1
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