[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er8pCbZhMgc[/youtube]
Quote:
First Round
Roger Helmer MEP (UK, UKIP, EFD): Mr. President, The report on last week's Council calls for "differentiated growth-friendly fiscal consolidation" - a contradiction in terms. It wants to "restore normal lending", to "promote growth and competitiveness", to tackle unemployment and modernise public administration. If there were a prize for clichés and wishful thinking, gentlemen, you would win it. These objectives are motherhood and apple pie but you simply have no idea how you are going to deliver them.
You should take a leaf from Konrad Adenauer's book, and ignite a bonfire of the regulations. You are drowning Europe in a sea of red tape. You need to promote a low-tax, growth-friendly Europe.
And you need to dismantle the euro. Again and again you declare the crisis over, but it comes back to bite you.
Now it's Cyprus. You talk of a Europe of values, with the rule of law and property rights. Yet you planned to confiscate the funds of savers and pensioners, while protecting senior bondholders.
You're breaking the promise of your European Bank Deposit Guarantee scheme.
You try to evade your obligations by calling it a "tax". But you have form in playing with words. You avoided further referendums on the European Constitution by calling it a Treaty. You broke your no default promise in Greece by calling it a "haircut".
Now you break your deposit guarantee by pretending that confiscation is a tax. This is not a tax. This is EU theft by a fancy name. This is the very symbol and measure of your failure and your breach of faith.
Former British Chancellor Lord Lawson described the euro as "Possibly the most reckless political adventure of the post-war era". And and that he may have been understating it.
You, Gentlemen, have presided over unemployment, and hardship, and poverty, and misery, in Southern Europe, on a scale we have not seen in my lifetime.
Yet you sit in your gilded offices, you draw your inflated salaries, and you fiddle while Rome burns. You have no answers to the problems of European citizens.
Let me quote a great Englishman, Oliver Cromwell:
"You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"
Quote:
Second Round
Roger Helmer (UK, UKIP, EFD): Sir, you had the temerity to attribute the difference in unemployment levels between North and Southern Europe on divergent national policy.
But surely the question is not of divergent national policy, the problem is of a common monetary policy.
These are the very distortions created by the Euro which we have been predicting for more than Ten years..
Because the Euro exchange rate is too low for Germany the German economy and exports are doing extremely well and unemployment is low.
Because the Euro exchange rate is far too low for Greece, Italy and Spain, they are doing badly. That is the problem.
Frankly if you are so ignorant of the basic underlying economic reality of the Eurozone I despair. The truth is, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Between the Euro disaster zone you have created on the one hand and the reasonable legitimate democratic aspirations of citizens on the other.
You could save the Euro by massive transfers from North to South but German voters won't accept it. You [i]could try to save it by grinding poverty and deflation in the South but Southern voters will not accept it. I think gentlemen; the time has come to put your boots on because you are the grave-diggers of European democracy.[/i]
20 Mar 2013, 3:21 pm
