International

This week I received an email from the Vice-Presidents of the European Parliament responsible for ‘Communications’. From now on all Euro-MPs are to be assisted on their way to the European Parliamentary elections next spring via a ‘download centre’ - http://www.europarl.europa.eu/downloadcentre - where all kinds of ‘information material’ can be found. The material currently available is quite pathetic, and I have never once made use of it in my work as an SP Euro-MP. A bunch of amateurs have been working on it and the completely unusable results are now being urged on us by email. Utter wastefulness.

We have to cut spending. That’s what the European Union says and that’s what our Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem say. So how can it be that in the last twenty-five years that our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has risen by 35%, while the level of provision of public services has deteriorated? And how can it be that the rise in prosperity has not been reflected in our disposable income, which has not risen in fifteen years, after rising by a mere 20% or so in the decade which preceded that period? We are richer as a nation, yet the state must cut more and more services, while as individual consumers we also have less to spend. Something here simply doesn’t add up.

A few weeks ago I devoted my weeklog to the violent actions taken by the Turkish authorities towards the demonstrations against the Erdogan government. Many people have since emailed me over the matter, all of them emphasising how important it is, both materially and politically, for the EU to offer real support to the Turkish human rights movement. I promised them that I would look into what the possibilities were, and have since discovered that the EU delegation in Turkey both has the financial means and is prepared to deploy them in support of these defenders of human rights. Time to make effective use of them, because the situation in Turkey is onl;y growing more forbidding.

In September the European Parliament begins a series of hearings on the American eavesdropping programme PRISM, about which so much remains to be done. The strong reaction is quite correct, because the US practices are in contradiction of a range of agreements. We should not be naïve, however. European intelligence services collect massive amounts of data without our knowledge, cooperating within Europe, moreover, extremely closely, about which we also know precious little. So it’s not only time for measures to be taken to counter the Americans’ practices, but also for a thorough enquiry into the working methods of European intelligence services.