Mr President, this annual debate actually originated with the report that I produced in 1990 which had as one of its recommendations that we should continue to be vigilant about the rising tide of racism and xenophobia in the European Community. Since 1990, unfortunately, that Committee of Enquiry has proved all too well sighted. In France, Austria, Italy and in Belgium, previous post-war high tide marks for the growth of racism and xenophobia have been surpassed again and again.

We now have extreme right-wing and racist parties as the largest single party in Belgium's second city, Antwerp. We had 22% of the vote for extreme right-wing parties in Austria and, of course, we have neo-fascists in government in Italy. So we have been sounding the alarm and now, thankfully, the Council is starting to listen.

We welcome the Consultative Committee set up by Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand in Corfu. I and Mr Oostlander have been made, on behalf of this Parliament, members of that committee. It has 16 members plus ourselves and the Commission and it is running three sub-committees: on police and justice, on information and on the media. The 16 members are conducting hearings in their Member States and I hope that we can agree that the European Parliament will also conduct a hearing to feed into the final report of that Consultative Committee. The interim report is being agreed on 15 November for submission to the General Affairs Council later that month and the Essen Summit.

So our job today is to feed into that report, both the interim one and the final one. First it is clear that we cannot accept that subsidiarity should stop us from acting together to fight racism and xenophobia in the European Union. If it is right to harmonize lawnmower noise, to limit the curvature of bananas in the interests of the single market, it must be right to protect Europe's minorities - Jews, blacks, Asians - from discrimination. It must be right to protect from discrimination Europe's 13th state, the 12 to 14 million third-country nationals who reside in the European Union.

We welcome the resources the Commission gives to help the fight against racism and xenophobia. Sometimes, particularly amongst youth organizations, there is rather too much bureaucracy. But more importantly we believe that in the end we must have legislation. We do not want the European Commission washing its hands in public. We need a European race relations act to stop some of the expressions of racial hatred that we see in the European Union.

Mr Le Gallou complained about freedom of expression. We say in the United Kingdom that you cannot have people crying 'fire' in a cinema. What we have with Mr Le Gallou and Mr Antony and their friends are people who are not crying 'fire' but are pouring the petrol and lighting the matches. Yet in France we have the obscenity, the Présent got a subsidy of FF 0.5m this year to help it continue to propagate its vicious racism and hatred of the Jewish community.

It is not just the Front National in France it is also the Front National in Belgium. Daniel Leskens, the head of the list in Anderlecht, was pictured on a video urinating on Jewish graves and claiming that the Holocaust did not happen. That is the Front National in Belgium. We want a ban on Holocaust denial. It is absurd that material which is illegal in Germany or Holland can be produced in Denmark and in Belgium. We need to make sure that Europol can deal with right-wing terrorism. We believe that the European Commission has the power now to act. The fundamental declaration of human rights, Chapter K of the Maastricht Treaty and the Solemn Declaration against Racism and Xenophobia, signed in June 1986 means that we have the power now. We cannot wait until 1996, act now!

(Applause)