Madam President, the truth, and we have seen proof of it, is that it is often said by conservative politicians that we Socialists are opposed to the process of liberalisation. Nothing could be further from the truth. We fully accept a process which contains of good number of progressive perspectives. One of them is that, when a sector is liberalised, the greater the number of companies amongst which the market is distributed, the more the concentration of economic power is being limited, and this is a progressive objective which these benches fully accept. We cannot agree with monopolies which offer goods and services of lower quality and at higher prices than if they were offered within a competitive system. But, while public monopolies are unsatisfactory, private ones are totally unacceptable and unbearable. We therefore believe that services must be provided within a competitive system, but that that system must be subject to corrections in order to prevent a situation where the only people who have access to the services are those who, as a result of their levels of income or place of residence, are viable for the providers of the service, leaving out those who cannot pay the price for the services however basic they may be, or those who live in areas which are not viable for companies. It is therefore necessary to impose universal service obligations, but naturally the discussion on the size and conditions of the universal service will have a high ideological content. The Right insists, and always in defence of companies, that these universal service obligations should be as limited as possible. The progressives must insist that the greatest number of services must reach all the citizens at accessible prices. These considerations are reflected in this report. Its rapporteur, Mr Harbour, has done a magnificent job, but I must not forget that he is a member of a political group whose positions seem more orientated towards defending the interests of companies than towards the operation of the market. That is to say that, to use the American terminology, he belongs to a political group which is more ‘pro-business’ than ‘pro-market’. It is true that the report has positive aspects, and we are going to support those positive aspects without any doubt, but in other respects, it contains proposals which we find unacceptable. To remove the reference, as in Amendment No 2 of the report, to the concern about the dominant position which the former monopolies maintain within liberalisation processes, seems unacceptable to us; to remove the Commission’s phrase that lays done that services must be provided at an accessible price, does not seem acceptable. Neither does it seem to us acceptable to vote against, as happened in committee and which has been said will happen now, certain amendments which propose, for example, that a change in telephone service provider should not mean a change in the customer’s number and that, if it does happen, it should be done without cost to the user and at a more than accessible cost. It seems as though, in these respects, the desire is to hinder competition and the appearance of new economic operators, in other words to defend the interests of monopolies and that is something we cannot agree with.

Political group: PSE