International

The SP manifesto for the European elections, May 23rd 2019

When the city of Hamburg decided to introduce stricter environmental regulations in order to protect, amongst other things, access to drinking water, energy giant Vattenfall registered a protest. The company demanded a cool €1.4 billion, because it perceived the reform as a threat to potential future profits. The case was in the end hastily settled and Hamburg came away with nothing worse than a scare, but the city did readjust its environmental regulations. As a result, the German government was in its turn subject to a legal complaint from the European Commission, on the grounds that the country no longer fulfilled the requirements of the EU Habitats Directive. This is just one of countless examples of investors from outside the country in question claiming enormous damages for the simple reason that a decision, taken democratically, has put downward pressure on its expected profits. Even when this does not lead to an verdict favourable to the plaintiff, it sometimes manages to seriously undermine democracy.

Don't forget! On 23rd May elections will be held for the European Parliament. The SP's two MEPs are both standing down, and as well as offering a few tips to those who will be seeking to replace them, they discuss their achievements.

Many products on sale in the Netherlands are made elsewhere in the world, often under atrocious working conditions and for a much lower wage than they would be paid here. In the last fifty years a large slice of Dutch industry has decamped to low wage countries. The result? Competition between Dutch workers and workers abroad, the consequence of which is a race to the bottom. According to free market politicians and the multinationals, wages in the Netherlands must also be lowered if we want to compete with foreign countries. The ordinary Dutch or foreign worker gains no benefit from this, but big corporations have the last laugh as they see their profits explode.

No day goes by without some sort of crisis in the EU. Whether it's the refugee crisis or Brexit, the Brussels elite's solution to the problems is always the same – more Brussels, a European superstate, for all your questions and answers. The coming elections for the European Parliament aren't therefore about who will be the next president of the European Commission, but about where power lies. For SP Member of Parliament Renske Leijten and Arnout Hoekstra, who will head the party's list for those elections, the answer is clear. We must move towards a form of European cooperation in which Brussels no longer plays the boss.