Roger Helmer, on behalf of the EFDD Group.– Madam President, I have served in this Parliament for 17 years. I was here during the Lisbon Council of March 2000 and I well remember the target we set ourselves: to create the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. Yet, retrospective studies of the first decade of this century show that in fact the EU’s relative competitiveness slipped back during that period. But here we go again, undaunted. This time we seem to have created a sentence without a verb: ‘towards a thriving data-driven economy’. At least there is no target date, so we shall not quite know when we have failed. Can we at least learn the lessons of past failure? We do not achieve competitiveness with fine words in carefully crafted regulations: we achieve it by creating incentives and removing obstacles. We achieve it by setting free the entrepreneurial spirit of business and industry. I call on the Commission to keep this in mind and to pursue its laudable objective, not by detailed and prescriptive legislation, but by flinging wide the gates of opportunity.