Funding for research

Funding for research will help us confront great challenges like health and aging and energy, security and water security. Also, too often we allow bright ideas to be left in the laboratory or exploited elsewhere. Supporting innovation and development can help growth and competitiveness.

By collaborating with industry, EU research funding has encouraged significant investment from the private sector. A balanced programme should support small companies and individual pockets of excellence, but recognise the crucial role played by larger companies and leading universities.

We must not dumb down excellence. Europe can complement Member States' own programmes, but should not constrain them.

Simplification remains key. Less form filling, more real research.

There are serious questions regarding the impartiality of peer reviews in some sectors and this needs to be addressed.

Whilst increasing investment in research is welcome, I cannot support random figures plucked out of think air. The money has to come from somewhere else, and every penny of public money needs to work harder and be spent smarter.

The Ongoing Crisis in the Eurozone

Mr President, the sovereign debt crisis will not be solved until the banks are sorted out, and you cannot sort out the banks if regulators' stress tests refuse to admit that the sovereign debt crisis exists. There is also a public confidence crisis.

Some countries bailed out their own banks at huge cost to the taxpayers, without any handouts from the EU. I understand why the same public is now asking why they should fund bail-outs in other countries.

Last week's proposals for reform in Portugal had some positive recommendations for improving competitiveness, but the situation in Greece seems dire. Euro zone leaders tell us that there is no Greek debt restructuring, but since when is a delay of a repayment date not a restructuring?

If public lenders extend their maturities, that is not just a shuffling of deckchairs on the Titanic : it is taking the public lenders below decks to sink in the ship while the private loan holders are helped away to the lifeboats.

European Bank Crisis and Stress Tests

Mr President, last summer's stress tests were meant to restore confidence in banks. This was Europe's attempt to tell global markets to 'calm down, dear' . It failed. Nineteen weeks later, the Irish banks collapsed and taxpayers across Europe were forced into a bail-out, and just last week we learnt that EUR 12 billion of the proposed Portuguese bail-out is for their banks.

The sovereign debt crisis will not be solved until the bank crisis is solved – and the bank crisis will not be solved until markets are confident in providing capital and liquidity to banks.

Stress tests are meant to stress risks. To assuage market concerns they must stress the risks that the markets are concerned about, and right now the markets are concerned about sovereign debt levels. Refusing to test the sovereign debt held on the whole bank balance sheet will not restore confidence.

The European Banking Authority is of course caught between a rock and a hard place: publicly admitting that the risk of a write-down exists may perpetuate the risk of it occurring, but denying that it exists at all would be downright irresponsible for a regulator.

And then there are the trillion dollar questions. Behind closed doors the argument has focused on the numerator. What type of capital do banks hold? The longer individual countries fight for their own opt-outs, the more everyone becomes aware that not all banks are equal and market concerns multiply. But we should also be concerned about the denominator.

What is the risk of the assets on the balance sheets, and can you trust the risk weights applied to those assets? If US banks have risk weights 50% higher than European counterparts, are Europe's banks being allowed to fundamentally misrepresent the risks on their balance sheets?

The financial crisis should have taught us all to value transparency. For depositors, investors, borrowers and taxpayers these stress tests do not offer transparency and that is a travesty.