Madam President, Commissioner, today the world's eyes – or let us rather say, the eyes of Europe – were again upon you and what you were doing, although you were dealing with matters different from those which we are dealing with here tonight, which do not appear to be that interesting. However, I have just heard that I am permitted to speak for eight minutes, as my group is not especially interested in the subject. I see, though, that Mr Evans and Mrs Riis-Jørgensen are here, and so we can, anyway, give a repeat of our performance in committee, swapping our positions on this issue. But, joking aside ... We have jointly – and ambitiously – resolved that the European Union is to become the world's most competitive region within the next ten years. If the European Union wants to be the world's most competitive region, that means that its enterprises must be the most competitive enterprises in the world. It also means that we need the European Union's ambience to be both favourable to competition and capable of handling it. Thus far, it is right that our task should be to roll back state aid to enterprises as far as possible, and our task must also be – if we actually have to grant aid at all – to direct it increasingly towards horizontal goals. To that extent, the perceptible decline in aid between 1997 and 1999 is to be welcomed – and that is the period under consideration, the period covered by the Commission's ninth aid report. We still, of course, call on the Commission to perform its role as a guard against aid that distorts competition. On the other hand, we should desist from seeing aid policy only through lenses coloured by ideology, and from engaging in it from one ideological standpoint or another. Some of us do that from time to time in this House, and I will give an example of it later. Whether we like it or not, it is a matter of fact that aid is a tool of state policy, because it is used for incentives to facilitate control in line with the market and because it can be used to avoid the need for intervention in the form of instructions or prohibitions. That cannot always be done. It is sometimes more appropriate to achieve something by means of legal regulations, but also sometimes just as practical to do it by means of control in line with the market. Aid has a vital place among the political instruments, as it can be used to correct failings in the market and reduce differences in standards of living between regions of the European Union. What we are doing with European regional and structural policy is, indeed, also aid, albeit not of the State variety that we want to discuss this evening, and those policies are political instruments in supporting SMEs, environmental protection, research and development. Let me say, Commissioner, that I welcome the fact that you, or the Commission, now have, in addition to the register of aid systems, which has now come into being, the State Aid Scoreboard. That was something called for by all groups in Parliament. This State Aid Scoreboard, which is in its earliest stages, can, in my view, be developed into an instrument which will make it possible to discern trends and assess aid by reference to qualitative criteria – the qualitative criteria to which I have just referred. That, then, is something I value. It is not only the quantity of state aid that should be comprehensively assessed; we also need qualitative criteria and objectives that have to be taken equally into account. As I have said, I have named them. Sometimes they justify control measures with time limits, and even existing market distortions can be removed in the medium term by the use of aid. I believe that the Commission has a far more broad and open mind – with apologies to Mr Evans, and Mrs Riis-Jørgensen – than has the present conservative-liberal majority in this House. I have noted that, in general debates, there is always full-bodied rejection of aid as if it were quite simply a snare of the devil. The politicians in the field, should one ask them, take quite different views of certain points. In reality, they too want nothing to do with its general disparagement. Let me now give you the example I mentioned earlier. The Commission has, fortunately, been investigating for some time the extent to which sleights-of-hand in the taxation of businesses are being used to obtain illicit aid. The Commission is doing this on its own initiative and because it is right to do so, but it is also doing it because it was called upon to do it. In committee, I formulated a passage in my draft report which the Commission, remarkably, emphatically supports, and along the lines of which it intends to go forward. When a vote was taken, the majority in committee cut out this passage. Now, I will be giving you the opportunity to make good this error tomorrow. My group will be reinserting this passage, and a couple of others as well, by means of an amendment. Do please remember that this is common policy on which we have agreed. So, tomorrow, you can make good the committee's error, or, alternatively, make it clear in public that that is not how you see the details of aid policy. You will have to do some thinking about that. I want to wind up by saying that too much praise for the Commission is not such a good thing. Let us cut back on it a little. So I would like to refer, Commissioner, to something I touched on once or twice in committee. It also has to do with the subject of qualitative criteria, qualitative and quantitative assessment. That is the area, as you will rightly observe, of regional aid granted by the Member States, which makes up a very large part of the aid total, well above half, I think about 56% or more if I remember rightly. You will conclude that that is the area in which a reduction in aid can be best and most rapidly achieved. That is, though, rather a generalised way of looking at things, and I would again recommend that you think a bit about whether it is not perhaps the area of regional aid in which we have very definitely to be guided by qualitative criteria. If we were to have a debate on that next year, that would represent some small progress.

Political group: PSE