European Parliament
Koenraad Dillen (NI ). –
(NL)
Mr President, it is of course a good thing that this House has, today, been able to amend the original text of the services directive, although it has to be said that many of the hundreds of amendments were not necessary. The original version of the directive may well have put social dumping on an institutional footing, but the present version, too, permits a form of the same thing, along with all sorts of other abuses and does not entrench the country-of-origin principle in an unambiguous form of words.
Does it not speak volumes that the request by the Union for a Europe of the Nations Group for the establishment of a monitoring centre to ensure that the directive does not open the door to social dumping, was rejected? By abstaining, we are sending a political message that my party, the
Vlaams Belang
, will, just as it did last month in the debate on the liberalisation of port services, resist at all costs any attempt to undermine the principle that one’s own country comes first.

