Top Issue 1-2024

9 September 2011

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Europe’s leaders must start listening to the people, not the markets

ECONOMICS and the euro crisis are set to dominate agendas across all Brussels institutions, in member state capitals, and in people’s lives right across the continent.
Over the coming months, EU leaders will either continue on the same dire path or face up to the economic and social realities they have so far ignored. Having dealt disastrously with the crisis so far, disregarding anything resembling serious analysis and investigation of the causes and consequences of the global economic decline, European heads of state and government have pushed for the continuation of the same economic model and the same policies that led us to this situation. Not only has this approach failed to deliver the growth and jobs that were promised but it has actually exacerbated unemployment and drastically deepened the recession.
Neo-liberalism and the entire gamut of austerity attacks on the welfare state are hitting the poorest hardest, not just in the countries deemed by markets to be most “at risk” (and therefore apparently apt for economic sacrifice) such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal, but throughout the continent. The results have been catastrophic.
Europe’s leaders must start listening to the needs and demands of people, not the markets and credit ratings agencies that have wreaked havoc on national economies, downgrading them and the notion of democracy to ‘junk’ status. Opposing grossly unjust austerity measures such as welfare cuts and the privatisation of public services, the GUE/NGL is standing with the protest movements that have been building over recent months across many countries.
The GUE/NGL will keep highlighting the dangers to a social and democratic Europe posed by the so-called ‘economic governance package’ that will be at the centre of EU debate over the coming months.
Our MEPs will continue to campaign for far-reaching banking regulation; fair taxation; public investment in job creation; a financial transaction tax; EU institutional reform; and the reversal of the scandalous cuts that are ripping our economies and societies apart.
These are just some of the solutions. Our bottom lines are that financial markets must serve society; and workers, pensioners, the unemployed, students, women and young people should not have to pay for a crisis the super rich and bankers have created.
This is the main cause we will be fighting for this autumn and winter. Our challenge will be to ensure that the values and voice of the Left is heard in every debate, every forum, and every conversation whether it takes place in Brussels, Belfast, Berlin or beyond.

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Contributions from key figures in the churches, academia and wider civic society as well as senior republican figures

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