Mr President, my colleague Mr Cashman has once again had his reputation of being a good chess player put to the test, and his strategy of being perfectly amiable may indeed be the one that in fact leads to success. I personally incline more to the ‘aggressive journalist’ tendency, and, in my professional life, have found, rather, that you only get anywhere by going straight to the point and really piling on the pressure. In terms of their content, the points have already been explained by Mrs Maij-Weggen, who has once again gone into a lot of detail, this time in listing the information she possesses about who refuses access to documents – too little information on her part in the case of ‘who’ – where and when this has happened, and about who is requesting such access. Because we are almost experiencing something of a mood of celebration in the House, not least as we mark Mrs Maij-Weggen’s departure, we have also been thinking quite constructively in saying: please, Commissioner – and this applies still more to the Council – do not imagine that it is out of any lack of interest that so few journalists try to gain access to documents. Journalists have come to believe that they might as well be looking for needles in haystacks as trying to find the documentation they need. According to yesterday’s Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, ‘Nothing is more exciting to the public than what is supposedly not there’. Whereupon, the information enters the public realm through other routes and becomes, sometimes justifiably and sometimes completely unjustifiably, the subject of scandal. Might it not be an idea – and one that you could take on board today – perhaps to take the trouble to visit amazon.de or amazon.com? The way it works is that, even if you have something and nothing in the way of information – just a clue as to a book’s title or an author’s name – you arrive at the relevant page and are immediately told: ‘Customers who bought this book also bought ...’ With amazon you can go on to make and accumulate purchases, so it might be imagined that, in the case of the European Commission, documents in use might immediately be traceable. They are really very well managed, to the point of being childproof, youthproof and, if you like, with a guaranteed future. I therefore believe that a standardised portal along amazon lines – partly, but not exclusively, computer-driven and greeting people with the words, ‘Hello, you are now at our Brussels premises. What do you need? How can we help you?’ – would really help matters along, enabling a lot of what we are constantly talking about in this House to be achieved. The debate in progress today is, in many ways, reminiscent of the developments surrounding the Freedom of Information Act in the late sixties or early seventies. I personally remain an adherent of the principle that someone actually needs to have only an idea that something might be there and does not need to make a specific enquiry. That is something which still has to come about, and that is what the revision next year is for. This is something one can look forward to with some optimism if one hears as many good intentions as we have heard today.

Political group: PSE