Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-02-18-Speech-1-130"
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"en.20080218.23.1-130"2
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"Mr President, I thank the Commissioner. I believe this should be a very uncontroversial proposal by the Commission. As the Commissioner said: enlargement, more Member States, new technology, new equipment, computers. We need updated Commission legislation to allow good cooperation across internal borders in the Union against the bad guys – the organised criminals and so on.
I talked to the director of a major Anglo-Dutch company last week and he says that he finds organised crime is increasing and – I use the word which he used – ‘exponentially’, increasing incredibly fast, and yet the Member State governments do nothing about it, because the public does not know the full picture and does not push the governments, so they say, ‘Well, don’t worry, everything is okay’. We have a serious problem. So we need this proposal from the Commission, and everybody should agree and it should go through.
There should be nothing more for me to say, but actually there is a whole story to tell you, Mr President, which I would now like to do. To my amazement, my own Member State, the UK, threw in a veto in the Council of Ministers, saying that they would not agree to this. They did not tell me, though I am British, and from the same Member State. Not a single Labour MEP from the Labour Government in London tabled an amendment to anything, but they chose my good Conservative friend, Christopher Heaton-Harris, a very honourable man, who is going to speak, to pick up the Labour Government’s objection and he tabled an amendment, which is slightly weird, but I wish Chris good luck; he is entitled to do that. But what was the Labour Party doing in all this? So, I thought, this is very strange, and there are a lot of other British objections and vetoes and opt-outs going on in lots of different policy areas, so I thought I would investigate what the overall UK policy was on all these directives that they are opting out of, what was going on?
I went to OLAF, which deals with fraud in the EU, as we know. OLAF tells me that the UK refuses to cooperate with it, even though the UK loses billions on VAT carousel fraud. London says, ‘If we give OLAF a finger, they will take our whole arm, so we are afraid, and we will not cooperate’. This is very weird, so I made further enquiries in London. How does this work? And I am told this is what happens: the Commission makes a proposal, then a junior official in the appropriate government department in London has to write a briefing paper to recommend what the Government should do about it. He is very careful; he is a bit nervous; he does not know what to do, so he says, ‘We must not do anything about this. I recommend great caution. I do not think we should approve. Perhaps we should even opt out’. And his careful paper – because he wants to be promoted and not sacked – goes up the tree in his department, and officials who are busy doing other things say ‘okay’ and tick it. Other government departments asked for their opinion do not know either, so they say, ‘It seems okay to us’. It goes finally to a cabinet committee chaired by our Foreign Secretary – and he has a million other things to think about – and so it gets rubber-stamped. So, suddenly, the Government’s position in London is negative, cautious, in favour of an opt-out: ‘We do not understand. We do not really know what is going on’. Very strange indeed!
So what happens next? Well, back to the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection in the Parliament. The blockage in the Council has meant that I have attended several informal tripartite conciliations with the Council, first of all led by the Portuguese, now led by the Slovenes, in both cases excellently. And, although no UK official has ever briefed me about anything, and I was therefore the only British person present at the conciliation, even though the British Government apparently has a veto situation on this, it went through.
Finally, the Commission and the Council have found a form of words which has enabled the British objection to be got round, or overcome, or whatever words you like to use. So the amendments before the Parliament, for voting tomorrow, were all approved by the IMCO Committee and I hope very much that Parliament will vote for them tomorrow. But what is going on in London, Mr President, I just do not understand."@en1
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