International

SP Member of Parliament Ewout Irrgang is urging his fellow MPs not to give their agreement to the so-called European Stability Mechanism treaty, which would establish a permanent emergency fund in the Eurozone. The ESM Treaty would put an end to the Netherlands’ right to have the final word on the spending of up to €40 billion of Dutch taxpayers’ money from the new emergency fund. In Irrgang’s view moneys from the temporary emergency fund, the EFSF, have to date been spent badly, in ways which were aimed at imposing austerity policies which have done nothing in practice to solve the problems. In addition, control of the spending of resources from the fund has, he argues, not been well regulated.

'Everywhere that the people threaten to settle accounts with those who are responsible for the present crisis, they are threatened in turn with hell and damnation. It reminds me of the time of the referendum on the European Constitution. But just as it failed to do then, this will not help. Voters are much wiser than politicians continually think.’ This is what SP Senator Tiny Kox, president of the United European Left in the Council of Europe, told Alexis Tsipras, the youthful leader of the successful left party Syriza, at a meeting of the Council’s Parliamentary Assembly in Berlin on Tuesday.