According to its communication, the Commission intends over the next five years to continue the same internal market strategy, but to apply it more strictly and extend it to new areas. Not only does the European Parliament report support this approach, it also calls for the relevant measures to be speeded up. The starting point for the proposed objectives are what are typically referred to as the ‘enormous benefits’ of the internal market. However, no explanation is given as to who will benefit from, and who will suffer under, this procedure. Without doubt, the only outcome of all the measures to implement the principles of free establishment and free provision of services, the measures to liberalise the markets, the measures to promote the free movement of goods and the numerous concomitant laws is to strengthen the huge multinationals whose potential to extend and mobilise on new markets at greatly reduced costs has been facilitated and which have benefited from deregulation measures. These multinationals have seen their profits increase and their position consolidated. Unfortunately, the same does not apply to small- or medium-sized businesses in small Member States, where much stiffer competition has resulted in an increase in the number of bankruptcies, shrinking business and job cuts. The problem for these companies is not, of course, that they are ‘hampered in exploiting the opportunities afforded by the internal market’; their problem is precisely the measures used to implement the internal market, the principles which constitute the EU's competition legislation and the reduction in demand in the middle and lower classes as the result of anti-grass roots austerity policies. And, of course, the solution does not lie in venture capital and the financial markets, which increase the risks for most small businesses, due to their limited resources, but in a different economic development policy which supports productive investment, increases demand and makes it easier for small businesses to trade. The report calls for new, improved arrangements for companies by ‘simplifying the legal, administrative and fiscal environment’ and for ‘laws... which do not involve costs and other burdens for businesses which would otherwise lose their competitive advantage over foreign competitors’. In other words, even less accountable capital transactions and even fewer legislative specifications. At the same time, there is not a word about workers’ rights, about the fact that fewer obstacles mean less protection under labour legislation and less accountability during mass redundancies, mergers and transfers. It is not by chance that neither the individual Commission proposals nor the European Council guidelines make any reference to the need to limit these phenomena, control speculative movements of capital and impose a tax and other measures on capital. The report calls for greater liberalisation of sectors such as the pharmaceutical market and a reduction in the tax burden on employment, thereby proving that the measures being taken are paving the way for greater liberalisation of and less accountable capital transactions and profits with exceptionally dangerous consequences for the entire social protection system. The report under discussion is fully in line with the anti-grass roots economic and social policy exercised within the framework of the single internal market and EMU and we shall, of course, be voting against it.

Political group: GUE-NGL