Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-06-23-Speech-4-220-000"
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"en.20110623.37.4-220-000"2
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"Madam President, you are exceptionally generous as well as being a very good chair.
I would like to pick up on some of the clumsy vocabulary that we have heard in recent weeks in discussion of these financial rescue packages. The talk in our media is about rescuing Greece, giving assistance to Portugal, and helping Ireland, but that is not how the peoples in the recipient countries see it.
The reason that Greeks are on the streets protesting is that they understand perfectly well what the consequence of this EU/IMF takeover will be. The money is not going to ordinary Greek people, it is going to those financial institutions which hold Greek government debt. However the repayment will come from the ordinary taxpayer: in other words, Ireland, Portugal and Greece are being sent the bill for propping up the entire European banking system.
Why? Because we cannot bring ourselves to admit that monetary union was a mistake. We cannot bring ourselves to see the logic: that jamming together countries with widely divergent conditions and needs into a single currency was bound to cause precisely the strains that some of us were predicting 10 years ago when the project was launched.
So we exacerbate the crisis by having yet more integration, and all of the things that we heard about in the debate yesterday on this report – ‘we need fiscal union’, ‘we need economic governance’. You can see the flaw in the logic there, my friends. European integration has failed, so let us have more of it! Monetary union is not enough, we need more economic union.
The reality is that this is about saving face: saving the faces of those eurocrats who launched the project in the first place and who are prepared to sacrifice the peoples of the peripheral countries and the taxpayers of the poor countries in order to sustain their conceit.
Surely theirs must be the most expensive faces since that of Helen of Troy which launched a thousand ships."@en1
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