International

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.

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.