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13 December 2015

EU is destroying citizens’ rights faster than it recognises them

It’s starting to become a trend. It takes an eternity for an agreement to be reached on citizens’ rights in Europe, while proposals to limit these rights are adopted in record time. You see this above all in the area of Justice and in relation to social policy. In my view, we have to reverse this order, first of all securing citizens’ rights, and only then speaking about measures which under certain circumstances might limit these rights.

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6 December 2015

The European Parliament carries on regardless

The European Union staggers from crisis to crisis, but the European Parliament continues to dream of a federal Europe. During next year’s Dutch presidency, a report will arrive from the Liberal group leader Guy Verhofstadt advocating the transformation of the European Commission into a European government and the abolition of the Council of Ministers, which would be replaced by a sort of Senate. The message from a very large slice of the European public has rung loud and clear for years: could ‘Europe’ be a bit less? This message is seen by federalist primarily as awkward, and despite all the fine talk, the Brussels ‘bubble’ simply doesn’t give a hoot for what ordinary people think.

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29 November 2015

The EU's absolutely wrong approach to the refugee crisis

The European Union is delighted. Turkish president Recep Tayyip  Erdogan is delighted. There's an agreement on refugees. Hurray! In reality the refugees' interests don't exactly take centre stage. Erdogan will set up border patrols, as long asTurkey gets financial and political support from the EU. In this he has the EU in a stranglehold, and the EU member states hope to see fewer asylum seekers. How differently this could have been proceeding, had a UN conference with all of the involved countries in the region been organised, as the Dutch European Commissioner Frans Timmermans had in the recent past advised. Today's summit was not only a missed chance but came to an end with a ticking time bomb, of which the refugees and Turkish human rights are the victims.

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22 November 2015

Will Euro-MPs at last have to reveal all?

Last Friday it was announced that a group of twenty-nine journalists from every member state ia to take the European Parliament to court on the grounds that it has failed to give access to the accounts of MEPs relating to spending which has been reimbursed. A splendid move: these data are, to be precise, absolutely inaccessible, despite the fact that every year I request them and despite motions I have presented to the effect that they should be available having in the past received majority support within the EP. That will teach them…

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15 November 2015

Values

In the wake of the tragic events in Paris it could be heard from many different sides: this is an attack on our European values. In my eyes, with this we are falling straight into the trap set by the so-called Islamic State, by ISIS, for this is no attack on European values, it’s an attack on universal values. Values which the international community in the form of the United Nations assembled decades ago and which are laid down in a wide range of international treaties. The terror perpetrated by ISIS is not terror against the west, against Europe, as they see very well themselves, but terror against the whole world.

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8 November 2015

Euro-MPs boycott meeting to discuss amendments to code of conduct

The SP team in the European Parliament, along with lobbying watchdog ALTER-EU, were intending to organise a meeting in the Parliament on how the Code of Conduct for MEPs is functioning. We had concrete proposals to put forward for debate. But what do you know? All of my fellow Members who sit on the various EP committees and other bodies which concern themselves with this Code of Conduct and whom we had invited to attend well in advance, turned out to have prior engagements. Bad luck or evasive action? I fear it was the latter.

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1 November 2015

Where is the public debate on ‘Europe’s new claws’?

Last week the European Commission presented its work programme for 2016. The title ‘No time for business as usual’, is in a way accurate and in another way misleading . The Commission’s plans once more reach a bit further into the member states’ social-economic policies than we have been used to, but Brussels’ insatiable appetite is certainly ‘business as usual’, while what has also remained the same as ever is that the transfer of powers is being done surreptitiously, despite the fact that a serious public debate about this, involving the whole of society, is badly needed.

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25 October 2015

Competitiveness, growth and jobs – a new mantra

As a member of the European Parliament for the SP, I act as spokesman for the United Left Group/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL), the international group to which we are affiliated, in the Internal Market Committee. In every report which we debate, three words come repeatedly around: ‘competitiveness’, and along with that ‘growth’ and ‘jobs’. It’s a new mantra for the market-thinkers: if Europe can compete against the rest of the world, economic growth, and employment, will follow. The European Commission even wants in the future to pass judgement on their performance, just as they already do with the budgetary deficit and the state debt. But the mantra ignores the cost of all this: less democracy, fewer good jobs, and an ever-growing gap between rich and poor. In my view we should replace this mantra as quickly as we can with our own SP principles: human dignity, equality and solidarity.

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11 October 2015

No meat in Cameron’s stew of EU demands

A few years ago, with a great deal of bombast, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced that he would hold a referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union. If other member states want Britain to remain in the EU, they’d have to agree to a looser form of cooperation. The SP is also in favour of looser cooperation: cooperation yes, superstate no. That’s exactly why we oppose the British demands, made public this week: an elephant has given birth to a mouse.

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4 October 2015

Overpaid and bored to tears: European officials are fed up

In the past I’ve devoted my weeklog to the golden cage in which EU officials are trapped: they earn so much that nowhere else could they get the same salary. This week I read in the paper that many EU officials are also bored to tears and as a result are going into therapy in droves. So I’m renewing my call for a review of the salaries of top officials, if only for their own health.

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