Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-10-25-Speech-2-016"
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"en.20051025.3.2-016"2
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". – Mr President, I welcome President Barroso and Commissioner McCreevy to the Chamber today. It is unfortunate that we have not been able to utilise our time with them to discuss the document which they presented to the Conference of Presidents last week with regard to the future European social model. The reason why we are not discussing upcoming events, where we can have influence with regard to decisions that will be taken by the 25 Member States, is because certain Members of this House want to re-run previous battles, previous elections, and to try to insist in future elections. These arguments and this debate are predicated not on real divergence of opinion with regard to a better form of social model, but merely on maintaining an archaic, protectionist system. When you fail to win the argument, you then attack the man: you carry out a personal attack because of his accent, because of the way in which he expresses himself. That is the most despicable form of political discourse or activity that I have ever come across.
Let us look at the clear facts before us. We have a statement by the Commission that the social model of each Member State is its own business. Questions concerning collective bargaining or collective agreements are a matter for the Member States themselves and not for anyone else. The Commission has reiterated what we have known since 1969: the Commission’s role is to defend the European Treaties, whether it be Article 49, Article 21, Article 95 or Article 99. We also have a new document from the Commission, agreed by the College, which puts forward the best parts of the social models that are available to us within the European Union and states that this should be our minimum standard, our starting point. But what do we see happening? We see Member State governments – the Swedish Government in particular – utilising an opportunity given to it by the Socialist Group in this Parliament to express its opposition to the Services Directive when, for three years, it has been in favour of that directive. We now have a situation where Members are standing up in this House to say that they are defending workers’ rights in Latvia as well as in Sweden, despite the fact that the only exact information we have is that Latvian workers have lost their jobs because of the actions of some Swedish governments and trade unions.
It does not behove the future negotiations and discussions on behalf of Europe that, within this House, we cannot even set down proper debating time to discuss real issues rather than abstract principles."@en1
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