Mr President, I was absolutely appalled at the response we had today from the Germany presidency to our oral question on this subject, both as regards the person who was sent, a junior minister, and as regards what that person was sent to say. We heard an entirely spurious set of reasons for holding up this anti-poverty programme, which concerned the legal base of Article 235 and subsidiarity.

The German presidency should bear in mind that one other government uses the argument of subsidiarity to hold up social progress. In that country, the United Kingdom, we have seen poverty triple since 1979. Four and a half million of the people living in poverty in that country are in households with a wage-earner, the working poor in Britain. If that is what subsidiarity does for poverty, we want nothing to do with it at all. We want the German presidency quickly to dissociate itself from it and to put it on the agenda for 6 December. We need this to be adopted as quickly as possible.