International

You would hardly expect it in a week when the European Parliament also voted to back the new laws on European economic governance, but last Friday Commission officials confirmed that they were intending to interfere less in the work of local and regional authorities. This principally concerns the obligatory tender process and accusations of unjustified state aid. Tomorrow I intend to put these promises to the test, by asking the Commission if it is in agreement with the raising of the income threshold for social housing so that people earning €33.000-€43.000 per annum can be considered for social rented apartments and houses.

Things have been extremely tense both in The Hague and in Brussels: Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager would at last tell us what would happen if Greece really did go bankrupt or even walked out of the Eurozone. More than a year ago I was already asking the European Commission for this information, but at the time their view was that these were ‘not options’. So De Jager could have been, even for parliamentarians in Brussels, a unique source of information. But it was not to be: the Minister is prepared to inform Members of Parliament, but only behind closed doors. This would be fitting in a dictatorship, but not in the democracy that the Netherlands is supposed to be.

The chair of the Liberal group in the European Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt, issues persistent pleas for political leadership. What he means by this is that leaders of governments ‘must have the courage to opt for a United States of Europe’, even if the vast majority of the population don’t want any such thing: it must be, in order to calm the financial markets. This is prettily put, but ugly all the same. It isn’t the European public who caused the crisis, but the speculators, so I don’t think it offers much evidence of leadership if you saddle the people with a neoliberal European economic governance that looks primarily to austerity and to cuts in public provision. In my view political leadership would involve chasing the speculators back down into the pit where they belong. That’s why we have this week brought forward a number of proposals for a European action plan against speculators. I am curious to know whether Verhofstadt has the courage to show leadership in this matter, but I fear the worst. His pals from the financial lobby wouldn’t like that one little bit.

In the run-up to last week’s extraordinary summit there was a prevailing atmosphere of excitement, but as the results became known this quickly ebbed away. Yet the government leaders have a great deal to explain to their countries’ citizens, having in essence stuck their heads further into the noose, without in reality having taken any effective measures. The worst possible scenario has arrived.