Dutch politics – Page 7

More government bullying of coffeeshops

Published on January 5, 2011

prerolled joints for sale

I’ve posted before about the “wietpas“, the current Dutch government’s attempt to slowly strangle the coffeeshops by depriving them of foreign customers, but that’s not the only measure they want to introduce. Another proposal doing the rounds right now is the idea to close any coffeeshop that’s too near a school, for the sake of the children of course. Exactly what is too near a school and which kind of schools will fall under this new proposal is still unclear. The only thing we know so far of the plans is that the governments wants to ban all coffeeshops in a range of 350 metres distance from a school, but not how this will be measured — as the crow flies, or based on the shortest route from a given school to a shop. That last measurement would probably the least harmful to existing coffeeshops, but even then almost sixty percent of coffeeshops in the Netherlands would have to close, according to the NRC newspaper.

They looked at the fourteen municipalities with ten or more coffeeshops within their borders, who together account for 442 out of the 660 shops in the country. Judging by the most positive interpretation of the proposed law, some 57,9 percent of these shops would have to close — in Amsterdam it would mean 187 out of a total of 223, including the world famous Bulldog. Combine that with the restrictions on selling to tourists and it would basically mean the end of the coffeeshop as we know it.

It’s an absurd measure, supposedly meant to protect children from the dangers of drugs, but the idea that teenagers looking for dope would bike 350 metres but not 351 metres to go to the coffeeshop is silly. What’s more, it’s already illegal for coffeeshops to sell softdrugs to people younger than 18 and the decent ones do check, as I know from my own experience. They have to, because if they do get caught selling to underage kids, it means they’ll lose their license and are barred from owning any coffeeshop.

Nobody, — coffeeshop owners, police, city councils, social workers or even the government themselves — thinks this measure will actually solve anything, especially considering the Netherlands is doing quite well already anyway, with one of the lowest addiction and hard drug use rates of any western country. The truth is that this government has an ideological hatred for soft drugs, partially from Christian moralism on the part of the CDA, partially from the “fact” that the pseudolegalisation of soft drugs in Holland is a leftwing legacy of “the seventies” and this government puts great pleasure in destroying “leftwing hobby horses” just for the sake of it.

Everything of value is vulnerable

Published on November 27, 2010

And in a time of economic crisis it’s always easy to cut funding of arts and culture. Nobody dies because musea budgets are cut, symphonic orchestras disband or theatres are closed. Yet people do not live on bread alone and the necessity for slashing budgets the way the current Dutch government wants to do is debatable. It’s not the arts that have put us in debt, so why should it have to pay for the bankers’ crisis? Sure, there probably is some wastage, some dubious funding decisions that can be looked at, some ways to do more with less money, but we’re ruled by a government that takes pleasure from its own philistinism and the cuts are done for ideological reasons. It’s payback for the “leftwing church” that has supposedly ruled the Netherlands for decades enforcing its cultural norms on “Henk and Ingrid”, Wilders’ average Dutch couple. Bullshit of course, but popular bullshit at the moment — there’s always room for resentment against elitist artists.

Which is why the protests against these cuts need to get the public on board, get their sympathy. A good start was made last week, with public stunts like the flashmob performance of Mambo by the Dutch Radio Orchestra and the Radio Choir at Den Haag Central Station done to protest the closure of the Netherlands Broadcasting Music Center, shown in the video above. If the art world wants the cuts minimised or stopped, it needs to do more stuff like this, to show people why culture is important, even if it’s grossly unfair these cuts are planned at all.

(Video found at 24 Oranges.)

The slow disintegration of Wilders’ movement

Published on November 19, 2010

So after the troubles with “Freedom” Party (PVV) member of parliament Eric Lucassen, who turned out to have been a neighbourhood bully as well as fond of (consensually) fondling women in his chain of command when he was in the military, you might think the worst was over for Geert Wilders, but you’d be wrong. Since then the floodgates have opened, with several more members turning out to have been a bit naughty. There was the guy who transformed his old job of teacher into having been a school director on his resume for example, a surprisingly common sort of vanity amongst Wilders’ MPs. More serious was the case of James Sharpe, whose Hungarian company was allegedly fined for text message fraud, while he himself was also accused of battery, supposedly having hit a sporting buddy with a spiked shoe. Sharpe resigned on Thursday, denying either allegation was true, but tired of having to do so.

This was still not the end of the trouble for Wilders. Today it was MP Marcial Hernandez who was in the spotlights, accused of having headbutted a civil servant in a “well known pub” in Den Haag. This incident had been in the news before, but had gone nowhere, with Wilders defending him, saying that Hernandez had denied headbutting anybody and he had no choice but to believe him. But today it turned out the public prosecutor had video evidence, from the security cameras in the pub, while Hernadez’s victim has complained to the police. Whoops.

You wonder where it will all end. The doom scenario Wilders must have nightmares about, is what happened to his idol, Pim Fortuyn, when they had won the elections after Fortuyn’s murder. Without Fortuyn the party tore itself and the government apart in a few months. Wilders has been determined the same would not happen to him, keeping strict control of his party. The PVV has no members, no internal democracy, but just Wilders making all the decisions, vetting candidates and so on in an attempt to make sure he would not be saddled by the same sort of changers that joined Fortuyn’s party.

Unfortunately for him, this approach causes its own problems. For a start, having no members means little to no income for the party, hence no money to vet prospective candidates professionally, which would’ve prevented some of the embarassement the PVV is going through now. Meanwhile, the fact that Wilders can overrule his own MPs is causing annoyance within the government parties and opposition alike: you can’t make deals with PVV MPs as Wilders will overrule them. And with next year’s provincial elections coming up for which the PVV neds a couple of hundred of candidates and for which only Wilders and his MPs are available to interview and vet them, on top of their work in parliament — how well do you think this will be done?

No wonder one of his closest confidants, Hero Brinkman (who himself had a bit of a drinking problem), is calling for more democracy within the party. He argues that if the PVV had been a proper party, with members and local chapters a lot of the problems it’s been having could’ve been avoided. Other PVV members of parliament disagree though: that makes the way free for the wrong sort of people to infiltrate the party and before you know it, the PVV would think Islam was only a religion not a dangerous terrorist ideology!

No more Dutch chronic for Snoop Dogg

Published on November 17, 2010

Is there a more typically Amsterdam scene than seeing a world famous rap star bicycling to his favourite coffeeshop, like Snoop’s doing here during a 2008 visit? Yet, as I’ve blogged about two weeks ago, the current government wants to ban foreigners from all Dutch coffeeshops and today they confirmed that yes, even Amsterdam coffeeshops would no longer be able to serve tourists. Which means Snoop has to get his “chronic” elsewhere in future and with him some twentyfive percent of all tourists visiting Amsterdam, something even the rightwing VVD faction in the city council finds absurd. Not only would it be a serious economic blow to the city, it would also mean the soft drugs trade being driven underground, tourists getting their fix from the street rather than a licensed coffeeshop…

But I fear that these arguments, valid as they are, will not persuade the national government to change its policies. Its policies are driven by ideology, not facts and making soft drugs illegal to sell to tourists is just a new step towards a general ban. What’s more, even the economic arguments won’t stop them: they don’t care about Amsterdam — their voters live in the provinces, not here. Amsterdam is a leftwing city and these rightwing, provincial politicians do not care if their policies hurt it.

There is one ray of hope however. A pilot project with a wietpas, in which foreigners were excluded from coffeeshops, was set up last year in Limburg (the sticky out bit in the southeast of the Netherlands), but has been judged illegal by the Maastricht courts. It ruled that any such scheme, which priviledged inhabitants of the Netherlands above tourists, was against article one of the Dutch constitution, which prescribes equal treatment in equal cases for everybody in the Netherlands, regardless of race, creed, sexuality or nationality. An appeal against this ruling is in process at the next higher court, so the outcome is still in doubt, but if upheld, it does mean a national scheme is illegal too.

Until that time however, any of my foreign friends wanting to sample the delights of getting hassle free joints in Amsterdam, might want to hurry…

Rightwing bully is real life bully — Film at eleven

Published on November 16, 2010

Dutch political news has been consumed this past week by the strange saga of Eric Lucassen, Dutch M.P. for Geert Wilders’ “Freedom” Party (PVV) and its spokeperson on defence and neighbourhoods. That last might seem an odd subject, but has become one of the buzzwords of modern Dutch politics, somewhat of a dogwhistle as well, as we’ve belately rediscovered that the old city neighbourhoods have been somewhat neglected and not very nice places to live in, not to mention full of foreigners. Though on the whole the Netherlands never had to deal with mass deindustrialisation on the scale as what happened in the North of England, nor ever had ghettos even roughly comparable with the classic American ghettos, every now and again we do get a moral panic about what we’ve done to our cities. In centre left politics this than manifestates as attempts at artificial gentrification, on the right it’s more about getting tough on crime and disorder, which quite easily transforms into getting tough on people of colour, especially young people of colour. Wilders and the PVV used this to win the last elections and Lucassen there held quite an important post within the party.

Until an interested newspaper started talking to his former neighbours and discovered that Lucassen himself might have been a bit of a bully…

Quite a shock to discover that an authoritarian politician is a bully in real life, I know, but the facts are there. He insulted and threatened several people, threw a bucket of water over a seventytwo year old man, shorting out his hearing aid, called one woman a fat pig, not to mentioned threatened yet another family with sulphuric acid — and all this supposedly caused by an argument about dogshit.

Bad enough, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. He also turned out to have played a minor role in a big sexual abuse case when he was still in the army back in 2002. Military instructors had been having sex, voluntarily or otherwise, with the women they had been training at the barracks Lucassen also worked. He himself was disciplined by a military court for having had a relationship with at least one woman in his chain of command, consensual though still improper.

There have been other scandals with PVV MPs, but this has been the first big test of Geert Wilders and his party. Arguably Lucassen’s track record meant that he was not suitable as a member of parliament, especially so since he had failed to mention any of this to Wilders. On the other hand, the current government only has a majority in parliament with the support of the PVV and this majority is only one seat big. Lucassen can not be forced to give up his seat to his party: once elected the seat was his until the next election, not the party’s. Only by his own resignation would it be freed up for a more suitable person. If Wilders therefore kicks him out of his party, that would mean Lucassen could go on as an independent MP and the majority of the government therefore would rest on the support of a loose cannon, unhindered by party loyalty. Not the best outcome for Wilders, or the government.

Yet Wilders has spent years hammering his law and order credentials, accusing the leftwing parties of mollycoddling criminals and decrying any leniency towards them. He has also spent most of the past decade attacking people, both inside and outside parliament, for dodgy behaviour, e.g. doubting the integrity of two ministers in the last government for having a double nationality… So here is a member of his own party with a criminal past, accused and convicted of the same kind of antisocial behaviour has party had promised to punish severely. So surely he would throw Lucassen out of the PVV, right?

Of course not. Political expedience trumped principles, just like it would’ve for every other politician. It’s a huge blow for his image as harsh but honest spokesman of the silent majority, as he casts aside his socalled principles the first time they get him in hot water. For those of us who have hated his guts from the first time he opened his odious little mouth however, it’s immensely satisfying to seem him hoist on his own petard. About time too.