Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-11-15-Speech-2-041"
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"en.20051115.7.2-041"2
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"Mr President, Mr Barroso, ladies and gentlemen, at the start of the parliamentary term I said in this House that this Parliament resulted from elections in which all the government parties were defeated – starting with your country, Mr Barroso, Portugal.
That was the sign of an economic and social crisis that was also related to European policies, that is to say free-trade policies. We needed decisive action but did not get it – not even after the referendum results in France and the Netherlands rejecting the Constitutional Treaty. In fact there was a temptation to ignore the people, instead of changing the policy.
We then had the presidency of Mr Blair, who presents himself as the answer to Europe’s problems when it is clear that he is an integral part of these problems. Indeed, his presidency is coming to an end and we have not even reached agreement on the budget. This is a failure for which you, Mr Barroso, must carry equal responsibility with Mr Blair, in that you and your Commission have gone along with all the stages of the crisis as it unfolded and indeed have ended up by making things worse.
What can we say about your most recent proposals, when you spoke to us about a simplification that in fact would mean not doing the good things, such as the REACH directive, but instead doing the bad things, such as the Bolkestein directive? The point is that the free-trade route is taking Europe down a blind alley. The problem is exemplified not by Europe or by enlargement or by Turkey, but by free trade; and today you have once again suggested that we go down this blind alley.
Instead we need something quite different. We need to draw up a plan to revive qualified development and a form of social cohesion that would be capable of reinstating the European social model as an alternative to the North American model, not as a poor copy of it.
To do this we need a sounder budget that is not pared down to the bone, and a package of regulations that would promote upward harmonisation and not the social ‘dumping’ of the Bolkestein directive.
We need cooperation within Europe and with other countries to relaunch qualified development, not senseless competition or the ruinous dictatorship of the World Trade Organisation. We must give priority to innovation and the environment, not to the absurd and disastrous revival of nuclear energy. We need communication networks that promote respect for the environment and do not connive at its destruction.
We need to give citizenship to immigrants and ensure that there is no repetition of the episodes we have seen in Lampedusa and Melilla. We must guarantee democracy and not the so-called security packages that adversely affect democratic rights and have furthermore been rejected by the UK Parliament. We must choose peace, not war. We should give preference to a democratic Parliament, not just one more bureaucratic authority.
Finally we need governments of the Left which look to change and not to large, unacceptable coalitions. We propose an alternative European Left, more and more closely linked to a European society that wants change."@en1
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