Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-26-Speech-3-025"
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"en.20050126.6.3-025"2
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"Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Mr President of the Commission, as Mr Schulz has already said, many passages in the programme you have presented reflect our thinking, and this is something I want to highlight. It is, however, in the nature of parliamentarians never to be satisfied with what they are given, and so I would like to concentrate on those points where I would ask you to take matters further.
Your starting point was the issue of better regulation, in other words, our need for a different way of making laws, and you also asked whether the public understand what we want. I do think that we need to concentrate, over the coming months and years, on those issues in which the public are really interested, such as that of public services, and that is where there is a lack of commitment on the part of the Commission, most particularly, in practical terms, when it comes to a framework directive.
When the public see one post office after another closing down, more and more other public facilities disappearing, and whole swathes of land laid waste, they ask themselves whether Europe is the underlying cause of it, and so I ask you not only to focus on the issue of private services, but also to give higher priority to services of general interest.
Secondly, your programme begins with prosperity, and then moves on to solidarity. You repeatedly stress that the two are connected, and you are right to do so. There too, I ask you to go even further. In the European model of society, in fact, it is impossible to separate the promotion of our prosperity from solidarity, and we do not see solidarity as a hindrance to efficiency, a hindrance to competitiveness, or even – as the Nordic model demonstrates – as a hindrance to flexibility on the labour market. If we want a flexible labour market, it is all the more important that social networks should be in place to catch people if the worst comes to the worst.
What solidarity also means for us, though, is that the public sector must not be starved or neglected. Growth, employment, and the fair distribution of income demand not an over-expanded public sector, but one that is alive and proportionate. We need – as you rightly said – more investment in infrastructure; we need, above all, more investment in health and education, and that brings me back to services, for it is a vitally important point that we in the Socialist Group in the European Parliament want to extend public services. On the subject of private service, though, I would like to pick up on something that Mr Juncker said: while we want the market for services to be opened up, we do not want social dumping. It is for that reason that the Services Directive is in need of revision.
Solidarity conjoined with prosperity does of course also mean the practice of solidarity with all groups in society, including various minorities – about which this House is now doing something – and especially the large Roma and Sinti minorities. I think this an appropriate opportunity to make that clear.
Solidarity also, of course, means international solidarity on our part, and that brings me to my last point, that Europe is a great civil power. We may be a soft power, but soft power does not mean weak power, the two are not the same thing, and that is something I think we have to stress. If we, as the Americans now acknowledge, were so successful in Ukraine and have to continue with a rational approach, doing what has to be done in the right order, and if we are heading for success in the Balkans, then we must apply the same approach to the shaping of international policy in such places as Iran. We also have to tell our American friends – and I emphasise ‘friends’ – in plain terms that it is not acceptable to take military action first; on the contrary, we have to try, wherever possible, to apply civilian solutions through negotiation and participation; that is the European way of doing things.
I am not in any way disregarding the fact that there are military elements in this. We may well be a great civil power, but the military element is needed if the great civil power of Europe is to be credible and capable of making itself felt.
Mr President, you have come some way; we Social Democrats would like us to go even further. The fact that the USA, China and Russia have a quite different view of the world means that we increasingly have to communicate Europe’s own, even to our own citizens."@en1
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