International

'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.

Willem Melching recently called the SP a ‘nationalistic party’. As evidence, however, the Amsterdam historian offers nothing but the fact that our party is an avowed opponent of the way in which Europe has in the last twenty years been continually vandalised. This is an odd stance for a man who likes to say that ‘facts are the basis of all historical reasoning’. Anyone who knows the SP will see that we are in reality a convinced internationalist party, one which wants European cooperation to be directed towards the essentials: peace, security and welfare – for everyone.