International

A shopkeeper I was chatting to yesterday summed it up: everyone goes on about Greece with its lazy Greeks, but Greeks aren’t really like that, are they? As a small businessman he knows how to run his own business – work hard, with long days and paperwork at the weekend. Just the kind of person you find so many of in Greece, a country of merchants and small independent business people, and right now it’s they who are getting hit. That’s what gets me about Geert Wilders: first it was the fanatical Muslims, now it’s the lazy Greeks. Basing your approach on prejudices seldom produces good policy. It’s a good thing, an extremely necessary thing, that we should debate amongst ourselves the question of whether we should really be putting more money into a bankrupt country, but if so we should at least be speaking about the real situation.

Yesterday in Amersfoort I addressed a large number of critical trade unionists at a meeting of Solidair, the network of union activists who are also members or supporters of the SP. A militant trade union movement is needed in the Netherlands now that the Rutte government has launched an attack on working people on all fronts. My role is to show people that this government and its right-wing chums use ‘Brussels’ as a vehicle for their neoliberal policies and, together with people from the trade union movement, ensure that we step up the pressure on Rutte not to put his name to the package of proposals on European Economic Governance due to be signed by heads of EU government that day. The implementation of these proposals would, in the space of a few years, make neoliberal policies obligatory for all Eurozone countries. Fortunately, many of those in attendance were prepared to put their backs into the task of making this the unions’ number one priority.

During the SP’s regional conferences in Bergen op Zoom and Arnhem on the last two Saturdays I was asked to introduce the discussion on the economic crisis. The central theme was the same: we are being taken for fools by the government of Mark Rutte – over the alleged need for spending cuts, over the consequences of these cuts for people on low or average incomes, and over the powers the government is transferring to Brussels. As far as this last is concerned, a little over a week ago Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager voted to approve the indicators with which Brussels will be putting the member states to the test. Amongst them will be matters such as wages and house prices. In the next few weeks European Finance Ministers will further elaborate these plans, but the main points have already been determined. The European Commission will gain the power to make ‘recommendations’ which the member states will be obliged to follow, for example if the Commission believes wages are rising too much or too quickly, or that the housing market is unstable.

Three Members of the European Parliament have once again given the institution’s reputation a hard knock. The three agreed to the request of a group of lobbyists to propose and vote for various measures of interest to these lobbyists. In return they would receive sums amounting to €100,000 per year. In reality the people who approached them weren’t lobbyists at all, but journalists from the (British) Sunday Times. Two of the three have since resigned; the third remains in post. The only good news is that there now, all of a sudden, appears to be a chance to put through a number of measures aimed at reducing the improper influence of lobbyists.