Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-12-15-Speech-2-036"
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"en.20091215.7.2-036"2
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"Mr President, I believe we should be pleased with the result of the negotiations between Parliament and the Council for the final adoption of the Union’s budget for 2010.
We have just signed a treaty, but we need a new spirit. Either we stop thinking that every euro spent in Europe is a waste or we join the eurosceptics.
On Thursday, we are going to adopt a resolution asking for a review of the financial framework in order to serve the new needs of the Union. I completely agree with this point of view, but I warn you that a review of the financial framework must be an increase. The new needs cannot be funded by cutting back on the current priorities. To make myself clearer – and I will finish now – we are not going to accept cuts in the cohesion policies or in the agricultural policy.
We should also be pleased because we have managed to maintain the funding for the dairy sector that we adopted in Parliament at first reading, which could help our farmers to ride out this crisis period. I hope that we will manage to find a permanent solution and that they will soon be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
We can also be pleased that an agreement has been reached to fund a microfinance mechanism for the European Union with fresh money. We can also be pleased because of something that seems obvious but is scarcely talked about: agricultural expenditure and expenditure on cohesion, which are the two most important European Union policies, have not been questioned. The truth is that today we can consider this to be a success.
We can be especially pleased because we have found EUR 2.4 billion of fresh money to fund the second part of the European Economic Recovery Plan.
Hidden underneath all this celebration, however, is a much less pleasant reality. There is no money to fund the policies that we have all allocated to the Union, or rather there is money, but there appears to be an unshakeable dogma in the Council: not a single euro more than what was approved in 2006 for the current financial framework. President-in-Office of the Council, this is not budgetary austerity, it is economic and political short-sightedness.
Just over a year ago now, the European Commission proposed an Economic Recovery Plan for the European Union. It was a relatively modest plan compared with what there was in the Member States, but it was focused on boosting the future sectors of our economies.
The Council was opposed at first because it was proposed that the financial framework be increased by EUR 5 billion. Following long negotiations and discussions, you accepted the plan, but we have had to do it in two years. You have forced the European Commission to do some clever creative accounting so that this money can be used without it hardly being noticed in the financial framework.
All we can talk about is transparency and simplification, but the Commission had to draw us a wonderful diagram in order for those of us who work on the budget to be able to understand its proposal. I challenge you, President-in-Office of the Council, to explain this agreement to a citizen who is still interested in what we do in the European Parliament.
This means that we are not creating the Europe that is close to the citizens that we all want. I am not saying this to be critical, but because until the Council changes its policy, European integration will be weak."@en1
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