Mr President, I would have liked a bit more time to prepare my speech, but that means I will certainly keep to the speaking time. Parliament must become the Centre Court of European debate. That is our ambition, but on its own it is of course not enough for us to want it; we also have to adapt our ways of operating accordingly. That, I think, is at the heart of the report that the Committee on Constitutional Affairs has adopted. The Group of the strongly supports this objective. We wish to thank Mr Corbett most warmly for the multitude of ideas he has elaborated here, which will carry us further forward. We wish to thank him for his meticulous work on highly complex legal material. We also wish to thank him for his exemplary cooperation and frankness, which have been a hallmark of this consultation process, which has gone on for a year and a half already. We want our work to become more political, for us to concentrate on the essentials, and we also want to organise it in a more responsible way. We want the current affairs debate, which is soon to be introduced, to make us more political. It is quite extraordinary that we have to make use of instrumental crowbars in order to get a current issue into this honourable House. We have to demand statements by the Commission or the Council in order to be able to express ourselves on the burning political issues of the day. One consequence of that is that the spectacle the European summits provide continues to get more attention than the decisions reached in this Parliament of ours. We need changes to our Rules of Procedure in order to achieve better balance in this respect. We also want to work in a more concentrated way. We need to do without time-consuming routine resolutions, even though many Members have become attached to them. We need a simplified procedure for uncontroversial reports in order to be able to concentrate on our legislative work. We in this House are all aware that by now some 80% of European legislation needs Parliament's consent, but I doubt whether more than half of our time in plenary session is spent on legislative work. We should also do something about working in a somewhat more responsible manner once our decisions have acquired legal effect and become something more than just demands and resolutions. That is why the proposal is rightly made to give the Committee on Budgets and the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market greater responsibility for compatibility with the Budget and with the law. There is no point in us making demands that cannot come to anything due to financial considerations or the absence of any basis in law. At the same time, though, we want to safeguard the rights of individual MEPs and those of the groups. It goes without saying that Members of this Parliament must have the right to speak here in their mother tongue, and that the groups must be entitled to put motions, but the prospect of eastward enlargement and the need to prevent this House being fragmented requires us to tighten up somewhat the conditions for the formation of groups. If I may mention my personal view, individual arrangements for bringing texts into plenary without them being discussed in committee have to be restricted, in order to enable them to be better prepared, and we have to limit them to really urgent cases. I say this with particular reference to the matters for urgent debate, which have recently developed into a procedure in which a relatively small number of Members are able to pass Parliamentary resolutions at a point when most of us are already on our way home. The procedure has to guarantee that as many Members as are able attend the group and committee discussions. Exceptions should be permitted only in cases of real urgency. The Group of the supports changes in this House that improve the way we work, making us more political, more visible and the European Union more democratic.

Political group: PPE-DE