Author Archives: Bernard Aris

As someone who has listened to the BBC World Service since 1977, I am very aware of the evolution of the Liberals and their merger with the majority of the SDP, to form the Liberal Democrats. Since the ’80s, Dutch cable TV systems (which started in every city, but are now divided in three regional networks and nationwide) have broadcast BBCs 1 and 2, and since the ’90 BBC World is also available in many places. This has allowed many cosmopolitan-minded Dutchmen to become acquainted with the British political scene, and has deepened my own knowledge and understanding of Liberal and Lib Dem policies and personalities.

D66 or “Democrats ’66” was a party founded in 1966 to try and break (or at least transform) the mould of Dutch politics and Dutch democracy. We always were a party for Direct Democracy: direct election of every city’s mayor, every province’s governor, and of the prime minister who guides each Dutch coalition government.

D66 was and is also an ICT party, drawing attention (as early as the late ’60’s!) to the civic and administrative consequences of computer use by authorities and large companies; the privacy issue has always featured prominently in our arguments in this area.

D66 was prominent in the fight to legalize abortion in the Netherlands (as were the Liberals with David Steel): coalition politics made this a law brought about by the Christian Democrats (CDA) and the right-wing Liberals (VVD), and supported by the Social Democrats (PvdA) and us.

We really made our mark on medical-ethical issues with our Private Members’ Bill on legalizing a supervised version of euthanasia. As a visitor to some Lib Dem autumn conferences in the 90s I helped spread information about the Dutch law on this among Lib Dems and (via their conference broadcast) on the BBC. I wholeheartedly supported Ludovic Kennedy in his fight to get it accepted in the UK, and enthusiastically saw it adopted by the LibDems.

D66 was from the very start the most European-Federalist party of the Netherlands; we started out in 1966 by advocating direct elections for the European Parliament and allowing the UK to join the EC. The first was totally new; the second was already Dutch government policy in those days. The Dutch were mystified when Harold Wilson bowed to his orthodox party wing in holding a referendum once the UK had entered the EC; and were horrified by the Gaullist and ‘Little England’-line Thatcher and her ministers took in the ’80’s.

Like the Liberals, D66 has had a rocky electoral ride in the past 40 years, with many ups and downs. We were elected in the first directly elected European Parliament in 1979, but lost those seats in 1984. We re-entered in 1989, and soon joined the liberal ELDR fraction, where we joined the new Lib Dem MEPs. People like Lousewies van der Laan and Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst became, in the time they were our MEPs, well-known Dutch faces on British television on issues affecting Dutch pioneering policy (tolerating soft drugs like marjhuana; legalizing prostitution and euthanasia), and the Dutch take on European policy matters.