International

Tents on Amsterdam’s Beursplein, riots in Rome, Wall Street occupied. We have seen nothing like this for a long time. The protests are attracting all kinds of people, but they all have one thing in common: they loath the way that politicians bow down before the speculators. That’s why the actions are directed against the grasping as much as against the politicians that repeatedly let them off the leash. As emerged yesterday during an SP day school, many branches are finding it difficult to get through to people who have turned their backs on politics for just this reason, and just when the SP could be making a difference, as the only party to have an action plan against speculators and the only party to defend people who need it most. On the Beursplein in Amsterdam, the Malieveld in The Hague, and in Brussels too, we must make it clear that the SP has always had the same line: against the grasping, and for the ordinary man and woman. We must help the unrest to find its way: only a common protest can lead to the fall of the Rutte government and drive the speculators back down their holes. So it’s 1 for all!

Yesterday was an inspiring day. Unfortunately for me this was not at the Occupy demonstrations, but, equally important, at the SP members’ day school in a former monastery in Biezenmortel. There we had the space and the time to discuss with a number of branches the euro-crisis and the Rutte government’s harsh spending cuts. More than ever it was clear to everyone how the crisis was provoked by the abolition of the rules which kept the speculators in check. The film Inside Job showed in detail that this was a well thought-out neoliberal plan put into place from the 1980s onwards. How this led to the rise of the coke-sniffing, whoring billionaires of Wall Street. And how, when the whole casino went up, the bill was not sent to them, but to ordinary people.

Throughout Europe governments are now implementing harsh spending cuts. In the South, riot police - and in Greece even the army - are being kept on red alert because the unrest is taking ever more serious forms. Small businesses are going bust, working people have seen their wages fall by 30 cents in the euro, civil servants are getting the boot. The neoliberals are using the crisis to impose harsh policies and the same thing is being done by Rutte in the Netherlands.

The SP stands four-square with the people with the people who can no longer understand how the grasping can continue with their greed, how the number of billionaires can continue to climb, and at the same time how ordinary people have to pay the bill. In Biezenmortel I felt how anger can give SP members the adrenalin to fight even harder, and ever more branches want to put a discussion of the eurocrisis and the protests high on their agenda.