International

Last week a popular TV news programme, EenVandaag, once more demonstrated that our country is a tax haven – not for ordinary people, but for multinational corporations which use the Netherlands to avoid paying taxes. Tijmen Lucie investigates.

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It’s enormously disappointing that, as a result of a Russian veto, the UN Security Council has not agreed to the establishment of a special tribunal to investigate the shooting down of flight MH17 above eastern Ukraine. The SP wants assurance that the perpetrators of this crime will be brought to justice and is asking the Dutch government to take the initiative in this. ‘The most important thing is not how the perpetrators are tried, but that they are tried,’ says SP Member of Parliament Ronald van Raak.

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SP Member of Parliament Ronald Van Raak is requesting the government to urge Turkey to cease military action against Kurdish fighters. ‘On Tuesday NATO, at Turkey’s request, will discuss the Turkish military action against Kurdish fighters and ISIS,’ says Van Raak. ‘The Netherlands must deliver the message that it isn’t the Kurds but ISIS and other Al Qaida-like groups who have to be combatted. The Kurds are one of the few groups which is fighting ISIS effectively. Furthermore, it’s of the utmost importance that the peace process with the PKK is revived.’

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The writer Milan Kundera drew a distinction between two types of provincialism. The provincialism of big countries consists of people paying little regard to what comes from abroad, their own affairs being enough; that of small countries, in contrast, proceeds precisely from an excessive esteem for the outside world, a world which is nevertheless seen as strange and out of reach. Hence the tendency of a small nation to closely embrace its important individuals, for these feed its pride and give the people something to cling to.

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Anxiety about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the treaty being negotiated between the EU and the US, is ungrounded, Daniël Bosgraaf and Raoul Leerling asserted in the national newspaper De Volkskrant on 23rd July. Yet anyone who takes the facts seriously must conclude that the TTIP would undermine democracy and privilege multinationals at the expense of governments, consumers, the environment and small firms, as SP leader Emile Roemer and Euro-MP argue below.

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How intransigent are the Greeks? How lazy? These go together rather, witness the reform proposals which Tsipras and his team themselves put forward. Behind the scenes of the refoprm proposals, repayments and a possible Grexit, a struggle is being waged against subjection to Brussels and against absolute poverty – and for democracy,

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No. That’s what the Greeks said in their referendum two weeks ago. No to still more inhuman austerity from Brussels. No to European anti-social politics. And no to the denial of national democracy.

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The SP has expressed vehement criticism of the agreement which the EU is hoping to conclude with Greece. According to SP Member of Parliament and spokesman on EU affairs Harry van Bommel, this agreement has been signed by the Greeks with a knife held to their throats. It does nothing to solve the structural problems in the eurozone. In his first reaction, Van Bommel described the agreement as ‘anything but social’.

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The European Parliament today voted in favour of the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system, a system of arbitration which gives special rights to foreign investors. ISDS will form part of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the trade treat between the European Union and the United States. Despite growing social disquiet and a fierce and spirited campaign by citizens of the member states and social organisations, the Parliament opted for the agenda favoured by European multinationals.

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