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 Index 
 Full text 
Verbatim report of proceedings
Wednesday, 17 April 2019 - Strasbourg Revised edition

InvestEU (debate)
MPphoto
 

  Jonathan Arnott, on behalf of the EFDD Group. – Mr President, this will be the last time that I ever speak in the European Parliament; I’m not seeking re-election. I was elected in 2014 on a Brexit mandate and we won the 2014 European elections. I’ve tried my best to remain true to that mandate. The 2015 general election in the UK mandated a referendum on Brexit. The 2016 referendum mandated Brexit, and the 2017 general election confirmed it. Four times the British people have made their views crystal clear.

So I find it somewhat surreal that three years on we are discussing the InvestEU project, another EUR 40 billion in taxpayers’ money and another EUR 500 million on top for the technical side, and yet we still do not know whether or not the UK will end up being part of the next MMF, the next seven-year financial plan for the European Union. It can’t be guaranteed – 29 March, 12 April, 30 June, 31 October? – and for that, frankly, I do blame the intransigence of the British Government.

And so tomorrow this House will rise for the European elections. The British people have told their politicians four times already to leave the European Union, and on 23 May they’ll tell them a fifth time. That’s why the Brexit party is surging in the polls.

I’ll finish with Frank Sinatra’s famous words: ‘And now, the end is near. And so I face the final curtain’. But as that curtain draws, we need only to be able to say this: that we didn’t do it ‘our way’, I didn’t do it ‘my way’, but that we did it the way that our constituents told us to, and that is what future politicians must, and should, do.

 
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