International

Last week Commissioner Frans Timmermans didn’t pull his punches: to save the rule of law in the country, the European Commission would be coming down hard on Poland. At the same time the British were informed by the Commission’s Brexit negotiator that they had presented no real proposals and that the talks would be held up. And then, to cap it all, Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker announced that he had a sixth scenario up his sleeve designed to make the EU into a true political union, or, as you might put it, a superstate. He had till then said nothing of this, because that would have given opponents too much time to mobilise resistance amongst the member states. You could be forgiven for forgetting that European Commissioners are merely high-level civil servants. It’s time we got rid of them.

Just before the summer recess the European Parliament took the decision to set up a special committee on the fight against terrorism in the European Union. Its mandate is broad, but my prediction is that the result of its deliberations will be to propose that the EU must be given more powers in this area, and perhaps once again that a new or strengthened EU institution must be added to the mix. Thirty of my fellow MEPs will study the issue for a whole year, yet to be effective, a struggle against terror must emphasise preventive work in the neighbourhoods and on the streets, enforcement by sufficient personnel and sound cooperation, all of which are national competences. This committee is therefore no more nor less than a waste of money.

In June the first death occurred, when a Polish truckdriver crashed into a row of lorries which had to stop suddenly because some migrants had blocked the road with a tree trunk. Truck drivers are still going to Great Britain, but for how long? Once again a time is fast approaching when it will be too late to act, and yet once again the European Union decision-makers in Brussels, and the Dutch government in The Hague, remain worryingly quiet, while the government in Paris blunders on. In the Netherlands we have started a petition calling for safe parking places and protection of the roads leading into Calais. Beyond that, I want to see action from the European Commission and the Dutch government. Our drivers deserve better.

On 19th July the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that it was acceptable for workers to be shown the door on their 25th birthday, because at that point in the full adult minimum wage kicks in and they become too expensive. So it’s clearly okay for minimum youth wages to be far below the level for older workers, and in the meantime young workers can go to hell. Two weeks ago the relevant committee of the Council of Europe – not an EU body but an older treaty organisation of which virtually all European countries are members – did take account of young people in its surveillance of the application of the European Social Charter, coming to precisely the opposite conclusion. No wonder that the European Commission isn’t in any rush to sign up to the Social Charter, which would after all put them under pressure to meet social norms.