Tag Archives: socialist parties

Bernard Aris

Trying (too hard) to curb EU free movement: A symptom of the EU-wide social democracy meltdown

By Bernard Aris | Wed 11th January 2017 - 1:55 pm

Just as I was reading Nick Tyrone’s blog about Corbyn betraying the EU freedom of movement but wanting to have the EU cake nonetheless, another recently-elected Labour leader came on Dutch public radio. Note the date: Tuesday, January 10th, 2017.

I’m talking about former Amsterdam alderman and present Dutch minister of Social Affairs, the ambitious lawyer Lodewijk Asscher of the “Partij van de Arbeid”/PvdA, literally: “Labour Party”.

In the 1980s, when Labour under Michael Foot was going through its “Militant Tendency” phase, the then PvdA leaders, ex-prime minister (1973-’77) Den Uyl and coming prime minister (1994-2002) Wim Kok deplored that leftist populism and leftist political correctness gone wild. So both criticised it: British Labour, come to your senses.

Not today.

In the Dutch campaign that just got started for the General Election on 15th March, Mr. Asscher, who just two weeks ago won a party leadership contest, just said that he counted on “European Leftist support” (PvdA jargon: from fellow Labour and social democratic parties) to pursue his top-profile policy: curbing free movement of labour through the EU. When the radio presenter quoted a phrase Gordon Brown grew to regret: “Jobs for our labourers first”, Mr. Asscher readily agreed. And who does he expect to get support from?

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , and | 21 Comments
Advert

Recent Comments

  • Peter Davies
    There is a general problem that all parties state their targets in terms of new homes built. While regeneration programs replacing bad homes with better ones is...
  • Peter Davies
    As usual, the article talks about a requirement for social homes and "genuinely affordable homes" but a strategy for delivering "affordable homes". We need to b...
  • Tristan Ward
    "The question on Monday evening is whether we should be as wary of it in private hands" Of course we should. We don't like anyone or anything that abuses pow...
  • Pawel Urbanski
    Gareth, thank you for this. Housing is one of the issues raised most often on the doorstep in London, and this is what Lib Dems in action looks like: Richmond, ...
  • David Moon
    We keep obsessing about the National Debt and fiscal rules, when the real weakness of the economy is our trade imbalance with the rest of the world, particularl...