Nieuws van de afdeling

23 June 2011

SP: ‘Ceasefire in Libya urgently needed’

SP Member of Parliament Harry van Bommel is urging that the bombing of Libya be stopped. ‘An immediate cease-fire in order to enable humanitarian aid to be offered must be the overture to a solution to this war,’ he says. The Dutch government wants to offer three months support to the NATO countries which are bombing Libya. ‘In the last three months hundreds of cruise missiles have been fired and some 4,400 targets have been bombed from the air,’ Says Van Bommel. ‘That goes much further than UN Security Council Resolution 1973 permits.’ Meanwhile, in Strasbourg, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is also calling for a cease-fire.

22 June 2011

Mass trade union demonstration against EU economic plans

On Tuesday trade unions demonstrated in Luxembourg against EU plans for economic governance. Media sources gave the figure for participants as 10,000. The right-wing parties in the European Parliament are attempting this week to force through the controversial vote on the package of measures that the Parliament must approve before they can be introduced. Parties of the left share the trade unions’ serious objections to the proposals.

22 June 2011

SP delegation in Athens: Creditor Banks must take losses

Emile Roemer and Ewout Irrgang in Syntagma Square in Athens

22 June 2011

Don’t use crisis as excuse for Brussels’ drive for lower wages

This week the European Parliament and the heads of EU member states’ governments will decide how much power to give Europe over the national economies. Strict rules and tough accords form the basis of the soon to be introduced system of European economic governance. The hue-and-cry over Greece is overshadowing these meetings. These moves mean that Brussels is threatening to sneak in, unnoticed via the back door, rules which will impose wage restraint, leading to a situation in which, over several years, wages will not rise and may even fall.

20 June 2011

Foresight: the Euro Crisis, as seen from a decade ago and more

On the eve of the introduction of Euro notes and coins in 2001 Ewout Irrgang, a young economist and SP activist who would later become the party’s financial spokesman in the Dutch national parliament, was interviewed by the SP monthly, the Tribune: 'The introduction of the Euro is no small thing,’ he said. ‘We are dealing with the biggest monetary experiment in world history. Twelve extremely varied economies will go over, in one fell swoop, to the same currency.’

17 June 2011

A Greek Tragedy

You can say a great deal about the Greek people, but not that they are stupid. They invented democracy, and in science and philosophy we are still living on the inheritance of Greek wisdom. But now, in our times, Greece has become everyone’s whipping boy.

International