Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-18-Speech-3-114"
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"en.20030618.9.3-114"2
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".
Mr President, this Statute is important, and it must not be allowed to go under. That is one reason why I am sure that by far most of our committee can live with the fact that this compromise takes no account of a number of our important points; this is, though, a parliament and not a meeting of diplomats, and that is why a certain number of things remain to be said.
In the committee, we favoured putting the financing of European political parties under the Commission’s budget rather than Parliament’s. In this afternoon’s debate in this Chamber on the outcome of the Convention, Mr Hänsch told us: ‘The nation-state of the nineteenth century is not the blueprint for Europe's architecture in the twenty-first century.’ We have to remind ourselves of this when discussing the question: what about the requirement that parties be independent of the state? If we take that as being fundamental, we may well get different answers to that question at European and at national level. It may be that the reasoning underlying the imperative that states should be at arms’ length from political parties and their financial arrangements, is best satisfied if, at European level, they are linked to the Commission rather than to Parliament.
Our committee was in favour of incorporating tougher sanctions in the event of political parties failing to comply with the requirements of financial transparency. We wanted the money not merely to be repaid; we wanted it to repay twice the amount. If there is not to be too great a temptation to do this, then sanctions must really hurt. That is why it is regrettable that it was not possible to negotiate this with the Council.
There are two further comments I would like to make on the questions that have cropped up. The way the Commission said that the doubling of the amount was not on, because there was no provision for it in the Financial Regulation, reminded me of encounters with people who say such things as, ‘that is how we have always done it’, ‘we have never done it like that before’, and ‘who knows what would come of it?’ Those are the sort of archetypal experiences that you get with bureaucracies. Or what was said on the subject of the question raised in the original draft, to the effect that ‘you in the political parties can do anything except fund election campaigns’; if that was the line taken over a long period of time by the national governments and the Commission, then that is another reason why the bureaucracies of the Council and the Commission were known and feared throughout Europe for their capacity for innovation, and I think we should not forget that, when it comes to taking decisions, a bit more awareness of real life would do us all some good."@en1
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