It was quite surreal to hear that the Netherlands faces an EU surcharge of €642 million for better-than-expected economic growth – in the same week as a new report revealed that some 2.5 million people, or 14 per cent of the Dutch population, live below the poverty line.
While David Cameron thumped his lectern and threatened not to pay the €2.1 million bill imposed on the UK, the response in The Hague was typically low-key. Prime minister Mark Rutte said he would take legal advice, while finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem later confirmed the Dutch would pay "if the facts are correct".
There's arguably domestic political advantage for Cameron in talking tough to Brussels. But grandstanding doesn't come naturally to the Dutch, especially if it's going to transpire that the bill was correctly calculated on the basis of GDP data sent to Brussels by Dutch civil servants. And when Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel – who backed Dijsselbloem for president of the euro group of finance ministers last year – made plain where she stood by chiding "David" that his €2.1 billion bill "didn't come out of the blue", the Dutch mood changed, just perceptibly.
On Sunday evening, Dijsselbloem told TV current affairs programme Nieuwsuur that if the charge was correct, then the €642 million would be paid, would be treated as an "incidental" expense on the government's books, and would not affect next year's spending plans.
“I am certainly not going to make budget cuts for it,” the finance minister said, a long way from refusing to pay or even demanding a renegotiation, and cold comfort for Cameron.
Such are the subtly shifting alliances of EU politics.
But perhaps it’s the Dutch electorate that Rutte and Dijsselbloem should worry most about, especially when the idea that the economy is strong enough to warrant a massive surcharge is so totally at odds with what they see around them every day.
To look at it from the taxpayer’s point of view, it’s worth revisiting some of the economic, financial and business stories that hit the headlines here last week – just 24, 48 or 72 hours before Brussels imposed its “penalty for good behaviour”…
The latest poverty statistics came from the Platform 31 urban research centre, part of the European Urban Knowledge Network, and – controversially – put the number living in poverty at 2.5 million, twice the 1.2 million calculated by the government’s own socio-economic think tank last year. It’s not just those at the bottom who are feeling the pinch. Figures from the national statistics office show that of the 4.3 million households who own their homes, one in three has an “underwater mortgage”, where the cost of the repayments exceeds the value of the property.
That set the backdrop for another report, this time by the national institute for family finance, which warned that there were now more than one million people in the Netherlands in serious debt – with every household unable to pay its way costing the economy €100,000 a year in social security, unpaid bills, medical charges and legal costs such as eviction.
Then came the news that Amsterdam is to allocate another €20 million, on top of the €60 million already budgeted for this year, to tackle poverty in the capital – with one-third of the additional money earmarked to help the estimated 6,500 children growing up in impoverished households.
At the same time, the health authority in The Hague published shocking research showing that by 2020 half its population will be lonely and overweight, prone to depression, anxiety, diabetes and heart ailments. The less-well-off will be most at risk. The business world wasn't any better. Construction giant Ballast Nedam announced yet another, unspecified, third-quarter loss. Anglo-Dutch food giant Unilever saw sales fall 2 per cent after a 5 per cent fall in the first half.
And so, amid growing concerns that the euro zone could slip back into recession, the price for this economic success has been calculated by Brussels at €642 million – payable by December 1st.
That may not be the reality, strictly speaking – but it will be the perception, and it hasn't needed Geert Wilders and his anti-EU Freedom Party to underscore the point. In fact, Wilders has been uncharacteristically silent.
