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Blog Dennis de Jong

12 January 2014

The Maltese breach

Next week in Strasbourg at the European Parliament plenary one of the subjects under discussion will be the new law in Malta which allows you to buy a Maltese passport for €650.000 (about £549,000/$890,000). This will then enable you to travel freely around almost every country in the European Union (UK & Ireland are the only permanent negotiated exceptions) with all of the rights that freedom of movement carries. A burdensome matter, because this is of course not a good thing at all: anyone with a well-stocked wallet, even the greatest of criminals, can set themselves up in the EU. Questions of naturalisation, however, go right to the heart of state sovereignty: quite correctly the Commission is not empowered to take action in this area. The question then arises as to whether we, if Malta wants to extend citizenship to foreign nationals on this basis, must go along and allow access to our country for these new citizens. A protest is, in any case, on the cards.

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5 January 2014

What does the SP want from the euro in 2014?

A very happy 2014 to all readers of this weeklog. Friday evening we got the year off to a rapid start with what the Netherlands’ Radio 1 billed as ‘the first debate between the candidates topping each party’s list for the European elections of 2014’. I was participating as the incumbent MEP and the nominee for the number one position for the SP, though this remains to be confirmed by the party’s highest decision-making body, the National Congress, at its pre-election meeting in February. At the end things became rather heated, with the Labour Party (PvdA), Christian Democrats (CDA) and Green Left (GL) at last wanting to know for once what the SP thinks about the euro. Apparently this isn’t clear, so I’ll use this weeklog to make it so with this declaration: we don’t want any more sacrifices made for the euro, but nor are we seeking the currency’s rapid downfall. We do want to see measures taken which will prevent its unravelling, whether that should come sooner or later, from causing more damage than necessary.

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29 December 2013

Exploiters

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.

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8 December 2013

European Parliament, Open Up!

As a body which represents the people, the European Parliament claims to be an open institution, but this is not borne out in practice. The EP is as involved as ever in back-room politics. High time that it really did open up.

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1 December 2013

Where’s Commissioner Malmström’s anti-corruption report?

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.

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24 November 2013

On to the 22nd of May

The final decision will be for the SP National Congress to make on February 22nd, but I was still pleased yesterday by the decision of the party council to nominate me to head the list of SP candidates for the European elections next May 22nd. I want to use this opportunity to thank all of the members of the party council for their continued confidence. This brings with it also responsibilities: together with the branches we must therefore ensure that SP voters don’t stay at home on polling day. If you want to put an end to the chilly neoliberal wind blowing through Europe, then our voices must become stronger, including within the European Parliament. In this, every vote counts.

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10 November 2013

Alan Greenspan’s contradictions

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.

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3 November 2013

Election Fever

Yesterday the lead candidates on the European Parliament election lists were chosen by a number of our rival parties: the centrist D66, the centre-right CDA, and the seniors’ party 50Plus respectively nominated Sophie In’t Veld, Esther de Lange and Toine Manders. Congratulations to them. At the same time I’m astonished by how early election fever has struck, as the elections aren’t until next May 22nd, and in the Netherlands we have local elections between now and then. The SP will determine its list of candidates and the manifesto on which they will run when delegates vote at the national congress on February 22nd. Given the low turnout at these other parties’ internal elections, it seems to me that election fever, to the extent that we can use that expression, has arrived too soon. For me the campaign will only get under way on March 21st, the day after the local elections. But at that point the SP will really get going, undoubtedly with a fine list and, just as important, a strong manifesto.

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27 October 2013

The danger comes from Merkel

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.

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20 October 2013

Finally a bit less secrecy in Brussels

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxemburg this week ruled in favour of more openness over proposals which member states put forward during negotiations on EU legislative initiatives. Up to now, these negotiations have taken place behind closed doors and national parliaments and the European Parliament have just had to guess what positions individual member states have taken. If it represents no demonstrable and serious danger capable of undermining the negotiations, then the ECJ ruling means that in the future this sort of information must simply be supplied.

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