Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-02-01-Speech-3-025-000"
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"en.20120201.12.3-025-000"2
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"Mr President, there seems to be some agreement in the House today that even if this pact is adopted and ratified – which of course is very far from a forgone conclusion if Mr Swoboda is right about what happens in France and other countries – it will do nothing to solve this current crisis. As a fiscal conservative myself, I should be delighted that we are enshrining fiscal discipline and balanced budgets within national laws and constitutions. However, as a democrat, what greatly concerns me is that an electorate’s ability to vote for a high-spending Keynesian economic policy is effectively being removed from them. We are making socialism illegal. This pact is effectively rendering all elections null and void across much of Europe.
Let me say this. As a free market conservative myself who finds much to admire in the German model of fiscal and monetary discipline, we cannot impose our vision by force of law; we must also use force of argument. We need to show that austerity is not forever, that there is light at the end of a tunnel but, as long as we cut off the possibility of a Member State leaving the euro, then we block that tunnel. We condemn many countries to years of deflation, of poverty and of emigration, with no end in sight. Recovery will not come to many of the countries in southern Europe, in my view, until they are free to reissue their own currencies and to price their way back into the market.
Nor of course can we preach austerity to them unless we practise it ourselves. Imagine how a European summit – with its banquets, its motorcycle outriders, the armies of hangers on – must look to a public sector worker who is facing redundancy because of government cutbacks. Imagine how taxpayers in our home countries feel when every pound or euro saved in domestic spending is swallowed up by higher contributions to the EU budget.
My group makes no apologies for being single-minded about the single market. We will continue to pursue this agenda of creating the single market, of further extending services and reviewing procurement rules to encourage innovation. We will continue to push for better implementation of existing single market rules. And of course opening the single market would be pointless unless we continue to open our markets to the rest of the world; the parts of the world, that is, where there is still growth happening.
But many of these actions are in the medium and the long term. There is one action, however, that we could take right here right now to show businesses our commitment to growth. Surely one of the best ways for the EU to speed up growth is to scrap the Directorate-General for Employment and Social Affairs in the Commission and repatriate its responsibilities to national governments. Then we could scrap the Working Time Directive, the Agency Workers Directive, the Pregnant Workers Directive and all of the other barriers to actually employing people if we really want to create jobs in Europe. We cannot create those jobs by talking about them; by passing resolutions. In fact, we Eurocrats and MEPs cannot actually create any jobs at all. What we can do is get out of the way and allow entrepreneurs to invent things, to make things and to sell things. That is where employment growth comes from and it is also where social security comes from.
When I was a new MEP we had something called the Lisbon Agenda. It was supposed to make Europe the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. As Sarah Palin might have put it, ‘how is that working out for you?’"@en1
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