International

My Christian Democrat colleague Wim van der Camp tried it on Friday evening on the television talk show ‘Pauw en Witteman’; the parliamentary leader of the neoliberal VVD, Stef Blok, made a feeble attempt to do the same this morning on the Sunday politics programme ‘Buitenhof’: the SP, they said, would have no idea how to get us out of this eurocrisis. According to Van der Camp, that meant we had no right to say any more on the subject. How arrogant can you be? If they’d listened to the SP in the 1990s we wouldn’t now be saddled with a ramshackle euro. And if they’d listened to us just last year, the problem of the Greek debt would have been addressed in a timely fashion and there need have been no contagion to other Eurozone countries. And now, too, we have sound ideas as to how things should proceed, yet probably only ten years from now will they admit how good our analyses were.

Prinsjesdag (Prince's Day in English) is the day on which the reigning monarch of the Netherlands (currently Queen Beatrix) addresses a joint session of the two houses of our Parliament, setting out the main features of government policy for the next twelve months. In the midst of all of the turbulence surrounding the euro the European Commission’s proposals for an even tighter European Economic Government have attracted little attention. Yet the Commission wants to make Prince’s Day into a farce, a day on which Parliament would receive no more than a draft budget. The parliamentary debate would come much later, when the Commission had given its views, sometimes even in the form of an alternative budget. How the Commission will arrive at this expression of its wisdom would not be subject to any monitoring. Neither our own Parliament nor the European Parliament would be able to have any input into its advice before it was issued. This would undermine, therefore, our democracy and in my view we should reject the idea out of hand.

This week I received a study which revealed that VAT is being systematically increased across the member states. According to this study, such increases are leading not only to more inflation and less economic growth, but also to an often forgotten effect, a reduction in the purchasing power of those on the lowest incomes.

On Wednesday the European Parliament will vote on next year’s EU budget. The report on which we will vote states that in order to stimulate economic growth we must not reduce this budget, but rather increase it by 4.2%. You might assume this to be just a bad joke, because this same parliament recently voted in favour of a package of measures designed to pressure national governments into imposing swingeing cuts in spending. So none of this makes any sense. The SP is at least consistent. We are for moderate and intelligent economies which do not harm the weakest in society, and this goes for the Netherlands as well as at the European level. That’s why I won’t be supporting this huge increase in the EU budget and will instead ask my fellow MEPs to set a good example and reduce their allowances for ‘general spending’ by 5%.