Guy Verhofstadt, au nom du groupe ALDE. – Monsieur le Président, tout d’abord, tout comme mes collègues et comme le président Tusk et le président Juncker, je tiens à exprimer ma douleur face au grave incendie qui a eu lieu hier soir à Paris. Je suis sûr qu’ensemble nous allons faire renaître Notre-Dame de Paris. Elle rayonnera à nouveau, plus belle encore que par le passé, cette Notre-Dame de Paris, qui est Notre-Dame de France, Notre-Dame d’Europe; j’en suis sûr.

I know that this Parliament has, in fact, no say in the decision that you made on Wednesday, but nevertheless, I want to warn you for one thing and that is for the consequences of the decision of last week, because, until now, we kept the unity in the European Union – the unity among the 27 Member States, but also the unity between the three institutions, the Council, the Parliament and the Commission, and unity built around our negotiator, I want to recall that here today, Mr Michel Barnier, who I want to applaud here for all the work he has done.

(Applause)

This unity, in my opinion, Mr Tusk, I have to tell you that very frankly, is at risk now. Instead of sending Mrs May back to London with no extension at all, or maybe with an ultimately very short one – a few days, a week – you gave her six months. But six months, everybody knows that 31 October is in fact too near for a substantial rethink of Brexit, and at the same time, too far away to prompt any action. That’s the problem with the decision that has been taken. I would not go so far as Mr Coburn here who would call it rubbish and because he calls everything rubbish in Parliament, but I fear that it will continue the uncertainty. I fear that it will prolong the indecision, and I fear most of all that it will import the Brexit mess into the European Union. And, moreover, that it will poison the upcoming European election. Moreover, my fear is that it will make from this Parliament that we say that in Dutch, I don’t know if you have that expression, a pigeon house – a dovecoat – the British Members flying in, the British Members flying out, and at the same time, waiting on the substitute benches, a number of Members of 14 other European countries. Banksy, colleagues, has already done a work on this. He painted the house in Westminster as a house a full of monkeys. He could be inspired to maybe make a second work, to paint this Hemicycle in Strasbourg full of pigeons.

My fear, Mr Tusk, is that, with this decision, the pressure to come to a cross–party agreement, as Mr Kamall has talked about, disappears, as we (inaudible) the last days and that both parties, Conservatives and Labour, will again do what they did already for months – run down the clock – and the proof of this is, was that the first decision the House of Commons have taken after your decision was to go on holidays.

So really – and I never thought I should say that in my life here in this Parliament – but maybe the only thing that can save us now is Nigel Farage. Why? As you will hear today, he’s already campaigning. He’s already rallying with a new party, the Brexit Party, catching up with the Conservatives in the polls and the old parties, Labour and the Conservatives risk to be wiped out during the European election. My advice to you Mr Corbett is that, if they are not stupid, both parties should make a cross-party deal now, immediately, in the coming days, to avoid this imminent disaster.

Finally, Mr Tusk, in the aftermath of the decision, you said something and you have repeated it a few moments ago, you said we may avoid Britain leaving the EU, and I’m against Brexit and leaving the EU, but it’s not our decision. It was a decision of the British people. So what my fear is that instead of killing Brexit, the decision could risk killing Europe. At least bogging it down again for years, putting our energy in negotiations with British leaders like Mr Corbyn or Mr Johnson, who, in fact, in their hearts, despise Europe, and this at the moment when we need all our energy, to put all our energy in the reform, in the renewal of our European Union. That is what we, and you also, should solely focus on as President of the European Council. And that spirit was, in my opinion, absent last week, Wednesday.