Syed Kamall, on behalf of the ECR Group. – Mr President, in the European Semester report, I am pleased to see that Parliament recognises the importance of reform and austerity. But what is austerity? Really, it is politician-speak for what my parents used to call simply living within your means. In my constituency of London, I support a couple of financial education projects such as PFEG and MyBank. But the first lesson of financial education is that you should not spend more money than you have coming in. Yet so many politicians have ignored this very simple rule. We need to relearn these lessons if we are going to fix our economies.

About ten years ago, the German Social Democrat Government introduced Agenda 2010. The German people tightened their belts, and today they are an economic powerhouse. In my own country – the UK – in 2010, the incoming Conservative-led government inherited a situation where one pound in four in taxes was being used to service our debt. We took tough decisions, we capped benefits and we cut the deficit by a third. These were tough decisions, but they also allowed us to cut income tax for 25 million people, create 1.5 million private sector jobs, and start to deliver growth again. However, we still have a long way to go. Before the EU lectures Member States about their budgetary situations, perhaps we should put our own house in order.

One of the reasons why so many people have so little faith in the EU is that we do not practise what we preach. We have a European Parliament that debates energy efficiency yet only last month told MEPs that they would be switching off TVs when we are not here in this building. We have a European Commission which tells countries how to manage their budgets, yet we have not seen the EU accounts signed off for eighteen years. Furthermore, we have a Commission which only two weeks ago told the Parliament that all was fine and now says it will run out of cash within a month. We have to learn to live within our means. Let us complete the single market, and let us cut red tape to allow companies to create jobs and sustainable growth.