International

In reaction to my tweets a truck driver wrote recently to inform me of a Bulgarian delivery driver working for IKEA who is paid €2.50 an hour. This morning, the radical theologian and poet Huub Oosterhuis in a speech to Christian students in Amsterdam gave another example. Portuguese men working with reinforced concrete were earning €6 an hour building the A4 motorway at Schiedam. Examples are endless: exploitation is increasing everywhere. The internal market brings ‘us’ prosperity, but workers – and not forgetting the unemployed - have seen precious little of this. Reason enough to put resistance to exploitation through regulation of the internal market at the top of the agenda at the European elections in 2014.

Last week, Commissioner Malmström was due to produce her long-awaited report on corruption in the European Union. The report did not appear, however. The earliest we can now expect it is January. There was trouble inside the Commission. Had Malmström dealt with some member states too harshly? Or was it that she was too candid about abuses within the EU institutions themselves? We simply don’t know. But together with the United Nations, anti-corruption group Transparency International and lobby watchdog ALTER-EU, we will on Thursday be upping the pressure on the Commission. We are celebrating ten years of the UN Treaty against Corruption, and the EU played a major role during negotiations for this treaty, but if this continues, the role of the EU will lose its gloss. Time to take the gloves off.

The German daily Die Welt published this weekend an extended interview with former United States Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. His answers are full of contradictions: the rules against irresponsible speculation are becoming too strict, but a further financial crisis could occur; in the US the debt ceiling should be scrapped, but in Europe we must maintain the even more restrictive Budgetary Pact; a European political union must come about, but even in Germany two decades have not erased the contradictions between East and West. Does Greenspan want to make everyone happy or does he no longer know himself what should be done? He’s very old, it’s true, but Europe’s heads of government are just as contradictory. This attitude is a ticking time-bomb, because ever fewer people in Europe are still prepared to accept this hypocritical behaviour.

This week the German magazine Der Spiegel revealed that Angela Merkel has big plans for the European Union and in particular for the Eurozone. To begin with she wants ‘contracts’ between the European Commission and the member states under which the Commission will completely take over the direction of social- and financial-economic policy. She also now appears to be in favour of a European budget for member states to which they would have access in return for good behaviour and which they would be able to make no claim on should they not do what Brussels says. This is all precisely what the SP does not want to see, but there is one ray of hope. Merkel wants amendments to the Lisbon Treaty to make her ideas possible. That will give us the chance to change some things ourselves, for example abolishing economic governance and limiting the power of the European Commission. Those would be great subjects for a referendum.