Mr President, when you read this report by the Committee of Independent Experts, you are amazed at how many unsatisfactory states of affairs are reported there; so amazed, in fact, that you wonder how it can have been possible for there to be so many. I think that the committee has really left us a bit in the lurch in regard to this. I do not think the analysis it offers is sufficiently thorough and searching, but is too superficial. I will try to explain what I mean by that. The experts are looking for more rationality, more administrative professionalism etc., but they are ignoring what is itself the main problem with the Commission, namely that the Commission is a political bureaucracy. In classical bureaucracy theory, a sharp distinction was made between the political and the bureaucratic. The bureaucracy was to be a neutral organisation, drawing its impetus from the political system. But the Commission is a political democracy. The main problem which has given rise to the cheating, fraud and other difficulties there have been over the years is precisely the fact that the Commission is political in character, meaning that it acts politically and is therefore treated in a political way by other political forces. I also think that the committee’s recommendations point in the direction of a strengthened political democracy. The talk is of more internal monitoring, increased management responsibility and a more efficient and cohesive bureaucracy with more muscle. That is how I would summarise the ninety recommendations. I had hoped to hear something quite different: more talk about the principle of transparency, more talk about freedom of information. How are people like Van Buitenen going to go on in the future? Will they get caught? Will they be stopped? Will they be silenced, or will they get to speak freely? I would like to hear more talk about openness and public control. That is the first problem I think requires a deeper analysis, that is to say how a political democracy’s internal antagonisms and problems are to be dealt with. The second problem, which is also a major one, is in fact touched upon in the report, but too superficially. It has to do with the antagonism between the Member States and the central EU community. We all know that this is an on-going antagonism that characterises day-to-day life in the EU in everything, big and small. Joint decisions are taken at one level and are then put into effect by an administrative apparatus with offshoots all around Europe. International interests then come to dominate more often than not. That is when you get cheating and bad supervision and when even the EU’s inspectors and their attempts to carry out inspections are viewed as abusive meddling or as disagreeable acts of hostility. You do not solve the problem by sending in more EU inspectors or by tightening up on the hierarchical controls. Quite different approaches are needed. The talk must be of democracy. Discussions have to be started about how the Commission might be de-politicised and about how political power might be transferred to the actual political bodies. How do you go about that? Do you create a relationship between democracy and administration such as we have in the democratic nation states? Renationalisation is also a tool we can work with. Large parts of the EU’s activities would benefit from renationalisation. This would also reduce the problems concerning legitimacy. Political reforms are needed, then, and not just administrative reforms. I’ll conclude by turning to Mr Kinnock and to President of the Commission Prodi and asking some specific questions. What is the situation now regarding freedom to provide information? Are we to be getting any changes or guarantees in this connection? What is happening about the principle of transparency? What is to be done about the political character of the Commission? Is this something we want to hold on to and develop or is it something we want progressively to do away with? Those of us who sit in this Parliament experience on a daily basis just how powerful the Commission is as a political factor. Is this the road we want to go down, or ought we to be moving in the direction of the classical relationship between political and bureaucratic authorities?

Political group: GUE-NGL