Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-02-06-Speech-3-022-000"
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"en.20130206.4.3-022-000"2
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"Mr President, this debate has a weary familiarity about it. I think we have been here before. I thank Ms Creighton for coming here, and it is good to hear her contributions, but of course the key player is our old friend Herman who has not bothered to turn up himself and actually inform us what is actually really going on, so I cannot help thinking that this debate is essentially fairly pointless today.
Nevertheless I hope that a deal can be reached on the MFF this week. It seems that one thing is now clear – and to this extent I agree with many of the other speakers – once again the EU is going to miss the opportunity to fundamentally reform its spending. It looks like any agreement, if we get one, will be a fudge, a muddle, a botch as usual: a continuation of funding schemes that belong in another century. The continuation of the principle that first we set the budget and then we find ever more imaginative ways to spend taxpayers’ money and to spend that budget.
Our leaders should, of course, have seized the opportunity to sit down, have a serious discussion about where the EU delivers value, where it spends money badly and where money we all know is being blatantly wasted. The reality is that today’s budget would be remarkably familiar to people like Roy Jenkins, Gaston Thorn and Commissions of the past. If we had asked those presidents where they thought the EU budget would be spent by 2020, would they honestly say that we would still be spending 40% of it on agriculture? I doubt it. The debate around the EU budget is symptomatic of all the things that need to change in the EU, and we need to stop thinking that only a bigger budget will solve the many problems of Europe. Instead we need a better budget, which prioritises our challenges at the expense of the enormous amount of fat that can be very easily trimmed from the budget.
Now many people in this debate this morning have said that this is a growth budget and I suppose it is, provided you are a French cow. That will grow enormously with the European budget and we cannot in all seriousness stand here in Strasbourg – this icon of EU profligacy – and say that there is no money that can be saved in the EU budget. Yet the issue of Strasbourg does not even get raised in the European Council! Yet again I call on our President to raise it in his speech to EU leaders this Thursday, and perhaps with his new best friend, President Hollande.
Of course I know that the costs of coming here and maintaining this building are a drop in the ocean in the context of the total EU budget, but it would do us an enormous amount of credit if we can show that we can really shake off this expensive relic of the past. And that is the crux of the EU’s budget. We are continuing to fund policies that may have made sense in the 20th century, as well as trying to spend money on the problems of the 21st century. If we focus on the problems of today and tomorrow instead, we could freeze the budget and still see significantly better results for our taxpayers.
What could be worse than just maintaining the status quo in spending? It would be to leave the EU spending unreformed and then give ourselves new tax-raising powers and own resources. Thankfully it looks as though that is not going to happen, and we have seen in France – the country we are in now – what happens when politicians think that the best answer to their problems is more state intervention, more government-funded programmes and more government and state administration.
But I fear that whatever is agreed will fail to achieve any kind of meaningful reform. Instead we will probably come away with the result that most of Heads of Government feel that they can sell: most likely with a freeze on payment. That would not be the best outcome, but it would be far better than allowing the kinds of increases that this Parliament wants to see without any reform to our spending priorities.
Now we have heard as usual a lot of vitriol thrown at the Council today, not least by Joseph Daul, who I think, as President Hollande reminded us yesterday, seems to forget that it is many of his own Prime Minsters from the EPP Group that are pushing for reductions in the EU budget. The matriarch of his own political family, Chancellor Merkel, is asking for budgetary restraint. I know it is popular in this place and it gets a cheap laugh to have a go at David Cameron constantly, but he is not the only head of government who is calling for reductions in the EU budget. This kind of war rhetoric really needs to stop, particularly in a time of crisis when we should be working together with our national governments and not throwing bricks at them."@en1
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