International

Many Euro-MPs complain of the gap between the people and the European Parliament. Too little interest is taken in the EP; or there’s a shortage of quality information. On the basis of the latter argument we are blessed with all of those money-wasting communication programmes designed to send messages to the citizenry. But couldn’t it also be that the people have no time for the EP simply because most of the decisions taken there are ones to which most of them are opposed? This week various votes were held in which most representatives from the Netherlands voted directly against what the vast majority of the Dutch populations wants. In that sense you might ask yourself whether these MEPs are really people’s representatives at all.

This week from Strasbourg we issued a large number of press releases. In only one case could I be positive, but in almost all instances the EP seems to have truly lost its way. Take liberalisation of rail transport. In some of the media this decision was presented as a great result, because our own state railway, NS, will continue to operate most major services. Come again? Is it a great result when Brussels is dictating to us how we organise our railways? The great majority of Dutch people want to return to having a single rail company for the whole of the Netherlands, over which the national Parliament could maintain close surveillance. They no longer believe in the liberalisation fairy stories. To put it bluntly, just who does the EP now represent? The people who don’t favour the liberalisation plans? The national Parliament that would rather put the two major parts of the old unified state network, ProRail, and the residual NS back together? True representatives of the people would simply have rejected the liberalisation proposal in its entirety. So of course I voted against.

We also voted this week on the introduction of a European sales law for cross-border purchases. This is a case of pure deception. A number of years ago the European Commission asked several researchers, informally, to write a sort of European Book of Civil Law. Member states need not fear, we were told: the Commission would not be proposing a sort of European civil legal code. In an informal meeting, Commissioner Vivianne Reding was indeed honest, telling me that she certainly did want such a legal code, but that she would be introducing it step by step. So the first step is now the establishment of this European sales law for cross-border purchases. Firms – and not the consumer – can choose: either they will continue under national sales law, or they will switch to European sales law. Of course they will choose the one which turns out to be most advantageous for them, and the Dutch consumer will in this way lose out: shorter guarantee periods, the right to give up a subscription on a monthly basis scrapped in favour of an annual basis, and higher up-front payments for purchases, to give just a few examples. Those who are supposed to represent the Dutch people have left the consumer out in the cold. So the Dutch Consumers’ Union is also not terribly happy with this decision.

There are still more examples of decisions taken this week with which most Dutch people would not agree: the compulsory installation of a spy-box in cars, the call for visits to prostitutes to be criminalised, and the establishment of a European Office of Public Prosecutions. For EU-critical parties such as the SP such decisions are gifts, enabling us to show that the people are not well represented by the alleged “people’s representatives” in the European Parliament and that a vote for one of the established parties is in most cases a vote against yourself. So I should actually be pleased, but in the meantime such decisions, should the Council of Ministers agree to them, will be imposed on Dutch society. And that is a terrible pity.