Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Mr President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, I am indeed very well aware of the backdrop against which the Greek Presidency of the Council is obliged to make preparations for the Spring Summit. What makes it certainly the most difficult Spring Summit since Lisbon, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, is the global economic situation and the prospect of an imminent war, which we hope yet to be able to prevent. In a situation such as this, a great deal of responsibility rests upon your shoulders, but there is only one mistake you can make, a very serious one, and that would be if you were to allow your courage to fail you – the courage to, for once, push to one side the declarations prepared by the many bureaucracies; the courage to distance yourself to some degree from the anaemic statements, all couched in the same language; the courage to engage in real discussion among yourselves of the real conditions under which the people of the European Union live. We know from former Presidents of the Council that finding the courage to break with ritual is perhaps the hardest thing of all. It is not simple. Let me give two reasons why I think it essential that you summon up the courage to do this. What we learn from an unvarnished depiction of the situation is that investment, both private and public, in Europe is at a low point. We have to take especial note of the fact that public-sector investment is collapsing in those economies on which a major part of our economic development depends. This is where ritual invocation of the Stability and Growth Pact is not enough. When will we at last affirm our belief in the golden rule and put fresh wind and impetus behind increased investment in Europe? I, for one, want to hear no more from Members of this House who ritually affirm the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises without at the same time stressing the link with public investment. This question demands an answer, and soon. You are in a position to do this, and you can get it done. There is a second aspect that seems to me to be of great importance. Wonderful papers are produced on active ageing. I know about the demographic situation, and about how important it is to keep people active as they get older, but if you ask the European public, what you come up against is the great difficulty you have in persuading someone who has worked in a factory for forty years, perhaps working shifts, to carry on doing that job. You will find it even more difficult to convince a businessman that this worker has to keep on working longer, and, in particular, even more difficult than that when people out there know that these papers are written by people who reckon on going in their fifties or early fifties with a golden handshake. If you really want to do something, do some work on health programmes in the workplace, do something about enabling people to have an early-retirement part-time pension, and then, above all, ask yourself how it is that nearly 20% of our young people still end up on the labour market without proper training? These people are the future of Europe, and we force them into unemployment. This is an urgent problem, and I do not find anything like enough about it in our papers.

Political group: PSE