International

The media are happy: Dutch MEPs will be heavily represented on important committees in the European Parliament. These include in particular the Economic Committee, which five Dutch Members will sit on. In my view this is a miscalculation: this committee has in recent years in short order approved new laws restraining speculative behaviour by financial institutions. These laws were in our opinion unsatisfactory, but the fact remains that in this matter the legislative process is almost complete, which means in a committee of this nature one will principally be debating motions on policy. The SP has consciously chosen trade and the internal market as the sharp end: my prediction is that it is in precisely these areas that there will be much to do in the coming period.

As a Euro-MP the choice of parliamentary committees is only partly in your own hands, as I explained last week in this column. Nevertheless you are able from the start of the session to make your preferences known, which does have an influence. Many MEPs base these principally on the past: in 2009 a lot went for the Civil Liberties Committee (Justice and Home Affairs), because in the previous five years this committee had approved a great deal of new legislation, including measures concerning asylum and immigration, and this had received much attention from the media. In 2014 the media, as well as fellow Euro-MPs, are once again looking backwards, and it must be said that this is for the most part with an eye to resisting the new legislation on irresponsible speculation.

Most of the legislation for which the Economic Affairs Committee is responsible has already been adopted, however. It’s now a matter of implementation, but in this the European Parliament has hardly any involvement. Only if a new crisis breaks out, which given the instabilities within the eurozone can never be ruled out, will the European Parliament assume a modest role. Heads of government and ministers of finance will then have to take the most important decisions themselves, along with a European Central Bank under no democratic control.

My expectation is that over the coming five years trade and internal market are going to become important subjects. Everyone has something to say about the ‘perfecting’ of the internal market, which principally concerns trade in services. This is a top priority for the SP, because we want to prevent this meaning that still more public services are handed over to the market. Just think of the constant pressure to ‘liberalise’ the supply of drinking water. Moreover we want to put an end to the misuse of trade in services as a means of avoiding pension and social security obligations and collective labour agreements such as the Netherlands’ CAOs, where the service provider follows the laws of the country from which it comes. Under EU law, collective labour agreements must be followed only if they are negotiated on a national, rather than a regional or local level. No wonder that employers are increasingly clamouring for more ‘flexibility’ in CAOs. Flexibility would mean that they could even pay wages and fix other working conditions according to how things are in their home country. This is already a problem in the building trade, as well certainly as in sectors of road transport, where the rule ‘equal pay for equal work’ has long been flouted.

The SP’s new MEP Anne-Marie Mineur will concentrate principally on the trade agreements under negotiation, which are make or break. Will we join with North America in a single internal market? Will the Unites States’ stricter bank regulations soon be under review, because financial institutions see these as an ‘obstacle to investment’? These will be the questions facing us in the coming years. And these questions won’t be answered in the Economics Committee.

That’s why I predict that it will once again emerge that most Dutch MEPs have made the wrong choice, and that in 2019, after the next European Parliament elections, the Internal Market Committee and the Trade Committee will all of a sudden become popular. And so history continues to repeat itself.