International

An independent United Nations enquiry must be launched as quickly as possible into the incident in Syria in which chemical weapons may have been employed. Otherwise the chance exists that this will be used as a pretext to launch a war against Syria, warns Van Bommel, an SP Member of Parliament and spokesman on foreign affairs. ‘President Obama has already in the recent past cited the use of chemical weapons as a possible reason to invade Syria,’ he recalls. ‘A repeat of the invasion of Iraq must be prevented. In that case there turned out to have been no weapons of mass destruction, despite these having been used as the pretext to invade. An independent enquiry is essential in this propaganda war.’

'Short-sighted austerity policies mean that the Netherlands is now at the bottom of almost every league table.’ This was SP Member of Parliament Arnold Merkies’s reaction to the latest economic statistics and assessments from the CPB, an official, non-partisan body charged with analysing the effects of current and projected government policies. ‘If you look around, you can see that in most countries the economy is slowly picking up. In the Netherlands, however, we are falling further behind as a consequence of spiralling spending cuts and the resulting growing insecurity.’