Mr President, at this Spring Summit the Council needed to show itself capable of reversing its neoliberal political guidelines and to adopt a policy that gives priority to employment, public investment, inclusion and economic and social cohesion, in order to address the economic slowdown, unemployment, poverty and social exclusion, which remain at high levels in the European Union. Unfortunately, it did not do so. Instead of halting the process of liberalising essential public sectors and services, it has followed the agenda of the Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations of Europe (UNICE) and insists on accelerating economic reforms based mainly on speeding up the process of liberalisation in sectors and services, on the competitiveness of undertakings, on stepping up the coordination of budgetary policies and on the strategy of the Single Market, continually relegating the social sphere to second place, subordinating the objectives of the labour market, education and society to the entrepreneurial spirit, and insisting on the rapid inclusion of pensions in the financial services action plan, opening the way to their privatisation. In this way, it waters down principles laid down in the Treaty and impedes their implementation, specifically in the fields of economic and social cohesion, solidarity, environmental protection, public health and food safety, public services and social rights, sustainable development and the quality of life, which is unacceptable. Instead of suspending the Stability Pact in order to review the irrational criteria for nominal convergence and committing to a policy of economic development that is capable of addressing international uncertainty and instability, which has been made worse by the unjust, illegitimate and illegal war against Iraq, the Council is reaffirming the need for these objectives to be met. It is thereby sweeping under the carpet the serious difficulties facing some Member States and the serious social and economic consequences caused by the obsession with cutting investment and public spending, preventing objectives for creating high-quality jobs from being attained and increasing social tensions and labour instability. Even when the Council acknowledges the need to present a declaration on services of general interest, it postpones drawing up such a document until the next Competition Council, thereby forcing these services to obey the rules of competition, which is not acceptable because this heightens social inequalities. Instead of implementing urgent measures, as Parliament called for during the last part-session in Strasbourg, to address the increase in restructuring, relocations and closures by European and multinational companies, which are making thousands of workers redundant and which call into question the regional development of huge areas in crisis where there are few alternatives forms of employment, the Council has opted to attach absolute priority to companies’ competitiveness, insisting on structural reforms of the labour market, on worker mobility and on making labour more flexible and precarious in order to adapt to the current economic climate. Hence the question remains as to the rationale for creating the working group on employment: I would like the Council to explain whether this has been done to allay the concern in the minds of those people who still retain a modicum of sensitivity to the problems of millions of unemployed or whether the intention is simply to shape the implementation of the European employment strategy in order to facilitate the implementation of its increasingly neoliberal guidelines.

Political group: GUE-NGL