International

Election campaigns are always characterised by ‘framing’. Parties offer the voter a choice that best suits them. For example, the liberal Europhiles of D66 and the hard right anti-EU PVV seek each other out to make the election a duel between ‘forward with the EU’ and ‘out of the EU’. And the SP? We have nothing to do with this artificial divide. We have a unique position: not ‘out’ but ‘thorough change’ – no superstate, but honest cooperation. This is radical, but also realistic – which is why we are in the heat of battle a difficult opponent, both for the establishment as for those outside it.

During last Monday’s annual debate on the State of the Union, the VVD (the larger of the two governing coalition parties) proposed that one of the twenty-eight European Commissioners be given responsibility for the EU’s policies on “SMEs” (the Euro-jargon term for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises). An empty pre-election gesture. This week I joined other MEPs in proposing that in the future as much as possible of the legislation upon which the European Parliament has reached agreement should be subject to one more test to assess its consequences for SMEs. That’s no election rhetoric, but a serious attempt to prevent big business having the only say. This crowns five years on the part of the SP in the European Parliament of consistently considering the interests of small businesses.

The SP believes that it’s important that people can learn about history. Though it’s true that it never repeats itself in quite the same way, without any knowledge of history it’s difficult to fathom what’s going on in our own times. Despite this, I have systematically voted against the House of European History. Not only because establishing such a facility should not be one of the European Parliament’s core tasks, but above all because it threatens to become one big propaganda machine. A slanted account of history is something we don’t need. It would be a complete waste of money.

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.