Nieuws van de afdeling

26 March 2019

National parliaments to move to adopt effective rules for authors' rights

The European Parliament today adopted the now notorious directive on authors' rights. The SP abstained in the vote. SP Euro-MP Dennis de Jong explains: “It remained a difficult decision right to the end. As I wrote recently, it's important to us that artists receive a fair reward for their creativity. But we don't want to see disproportionate filters when you upload something. Unfortunately we weren't successful in having the directive completely clarified on this point. The intention was good, to make the tech giants pay artists for their products. The SP will continue to work for this in the Dutch Parliament. But this directive was still so unclear that we felt we had to abstain.”

26 March 2019

How do you manipulate public opinion?

Precisely twenty-six days after the attacks of 11th September 2001, the American and British air forces began their bombardment of Afghan targets. The 'war on terror' had begun. The SP was the sole party in the Dutch Parliament to condemn both the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on the one hand, and the bombing of Afghanistan on the other. In the Dutch media too there was virtually unanimous support for the bombardments. Where did this consensus have its roots?

22 March 2019

Put an end to the blockade of Gaza. Stop the occupation of Gaza

Foto: David Holt

At the end of last month, a UN Human Rights Council committee of enquiry published a hard-hitting report on Israel's seriously disproportional violence carried out last year against Palestinian demonstrators on the border with Gaza. Almost two hundred Palestinians have been killed by Israel and thousands wounded.

20 March 2019

Strong peace movement is urgently needed

Two major concerns characterise the current political era, a period that began at the start of the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union. The permanent war, for the most part waged in Asia and Africa; and the abiding need to put an end to nuclear arms. Now that the INF treaty has been abrogated, the struggle against nuclear weapons must be taken up again, and powerfully.

15 March 2019

Permanent war cries out for end

Foto: United Nations Photo

Since 2001 the Netherlands has supported every war of intervention in the Middle East and beyond. These wars have been waged under the leadership of the United States in order, in their own words, to defeat world-wide terrorism. It began in Afghanistan, where even after some seventeen years of fighting no end to the conflict is in sight.

14 March 2019

Stop the race to the bottom, fight the exploitation of workers

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.

International