International

The Chair of the Multi-Annual Budget Committee said last week that people who are looking to make savings in the European budget should first of all say just where that could be effected. This statement demonstrated once again how difficult it is to get my colleagues in the European Parliament to understand that you can’t keep chucking money around in Brussels when at the national level the most cold-hearted austerity measures are being imposed, and have been ever since the 1980s. We in the SP have made a whole series of proposals to combat EU wastage, one of which could in one fell blow save billions: halt the development of a redundant European GPS system called Galileo.

On Friday 11th March the heads of EU member states and their governments will meet once again. This won’t keep many people from their sleep, but there is a sizeable chance that the leaders will be taking important decisions regarding European economic governance. Will Brussels soon be laying down the law on the collective labour agreements that currently determine wages and conditions in most Dutch sectors, or on the age at which we will be allowed to retire? There’s a real chance of this happening.

Yesterday I was in Amsterdam for, amongst other things, a meeting organised by the Culture and Leisure Centre, the world’s oldest organised gay and lesbian group. The guest speaker was the South Africa-born ‘pink imam’, Mushin Hendricks. It was an impressive and moving gathering. In total contrast to the zeitgeist blowing through Europe bringing tension between religions, between secular and believer, what we heard here was a message of hope. Just as in Egypt, Tunisia and all those other countries in which Muslims are taking to the streets to demand democracy and human rights, there appears to be talk of revolution in the Netherlands, too, though a relatively quiet one. Five years ago a meeting of this kind would have been impossible, but now Muslim gays and lesbians are daring to express their natures openly. And the imam? He looked, and saw that it was good.

Tomorrow we will write a little history, when for the first time five Dutch political parties – the SP, Labour Party, the Green Left, the centrist D66 and the Christian Union will together present European Parliamentary questions to the European Commission. The questions concern the Dutch government’s proposal to make illegal residence an offence for which one can be imprisoned. Broad cooperation across party lines has been possible, as it was over the continued Dutch presence in Afghanistan, because the government’s plans are both inhumane and senseless, as well as being in conflict with existing European rules.