The real world today is a world in which huge monopolies abuse dominant market position, where gigantic companies merge, consolidate or are taken over on a daily basis and where monopoly groups acquire terrifying power, invariably accompanied by thousands of redundancies, which have a huge impact on employment, and the monopolisation of wealth-creating resources, markets and consumers. There were 345 new mergers in 2000, to quote the report, thanks to increasingly flexible legislation which fosters the creation of large monopolies which acquire dominant market positions. However, this is of no concern to the ΕU. What does concern it is setting a timetable for the definitive liberalisation of the natural gas and electricity markets, speeding up the rate at which the energy, transport and postal services markets are liberalised and safeguarding universal access to services of general interest, in order to improve the competitiveness of the economy. It is also concerned with abolishing state aid. However, the desperate attempt to abolish state aid is really an attempt to increase the profits of the already strong players and to consolidate their market position by excluding new competitors and applying the law of the jungle, the law of might is right and the supremacy of monopoly interests. State intervention does not, of course, touch the heart of the capitalist system and it often strengthens companies and businesses on a selective basis. However, without state intervention, even with the tiny, balancing role which it can play, the gulf will widen constantly to the detriment of less developed areas and sectors and the poorest sections of society, given that structural measures and denationalisation are carried out not for their benefit but to strengthen the profitability of big business. That is why the constant pressure for measures such as the proposed register of state aid and the subsidy scoreboard is intolerable. All the choices made by big business illustrate how worried it is about the possible renationalisation of competition policy (i.e. control by the Member States, not the Commission of the European Union), which is why the report proposes an international competition system in the framework of the WTO. The competition policy applied has resulted in large branches of European industry dismissing workers and losing important shares of the global market and hundreds of thousands of jobs. The disgraceful concentration of power, in strategically important sectors, has put the economy of entire countries in the hands of speculative multinational groups, with everything that implies for the workers. The loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs has caused unemployment to spiral. The workers are facing the biggest attack yet on their employment and social rights, they are watching their standard of living being eroded, poverty spread and the public sector and productive base in most countries in the Union being restructured and dissolved in the name of rampant and catastrophic competition, in the name of an absolute market economy and in order to promote the monopoly aspirations of big business. That is why protests against globalisation and the prevalence of the uncontrolled rules of the market economy are growing day by day. We consider that the competition policy applied is responsible for all this and we intend to express our complete opposition to it by voting against the report. – Huhne report (A5-0301/2001)

Political group: GUE-NGL