Today the ECR group has voted against the Implementation of the Europe for Citizens programme report.
Whilst we believe that a limited number of areas of this programme, such as European Remembrance projects highlighting important events in Member State history, or town twinning networks, have positive aspects to them and offer some added value, key issues outweigh them.
The ECR group cannot support a call to foster a shared sense of European identity and disapproves of the critical tone used in the report to refer to Eurosceptic views and the results of democratic participation when they turn out to be unfavourable to those seeking greater European Union integration. Such attitudes hamper freedom of speech and have little respect for national sovereignty. In addition, there is no evidence to justify the call for a significant increase in the programme budget, nor is there concrete evidence to support a connection between its budget and the poor success rate. Last but not least, this report's call to allow for a greater role for the European Parliament in decision-making in respect of the programme is more likely to increase the amount of taxpayers’ money going to this programme than it is to increase democratic participation.
