The government looks like a chain collision in slow motion. In front of you the havoc, you can already see the next car coming. Bystanders can yell and gesture as they please, the drivers seem to see or hear nothing and they wreck their vehicles like zombies.
Before and during the debate about Sywert van Lienden’s face masks deal, a lot went wrong at the same time. We can complain that the concept of ‘new management culture’ is already outdated and that everyone understands it differently, but there seems to be quite broad agreement on a few key points. For example: the government lies less and informs better, the House monitors more closely – including the coalition parties.
And the matter is simple. For some time now, the House of Representatives wanted to know whether Hugo de Jonge, now housing minister for the CDA and previously Minister of Health, was involved in the million-dollar deal that his prominent party colleague Sywert van Lienden concluded with the government for the supply of mouth caps. Van Lienden and his accomplices pretended to work for nothing, while exploiting the pandemic to get rich. De Jonge repeatedly claimed to parliament and the media that he was outside of it. Relevant documents to which journalists and the House of Representatives were entitled have meanwhile been withheld from them for as long as possible. When journalists from this newspaper managed to uncover part of it, it turned out that De Jonge had personally pushed through that business was being done with Van Lienden.
The defense is obvious: face masks were badly needed at the time and De Jonge did not know that Van Lienden was an impostor. But that doesn’t work. Released reports show that De Jonge was mainly concerned about negative publicity, not about supplies. More importantly, he could have put forward such a defense the moment the question was asked, if he had answered it honestly. He chose not to.
After he was caught and when he thought he could save his skin with it, he suddenly had responsible minister Helder sent his app traffic with Van Lienden and officials to the House. Thus proving that they had been withheld without good reason, in violation of the constitution.
The excuse the government had used for this is an ongoing investigation into the controversial deal by an accounting firm. That research has been made so big, it checks so completely the purchase of protective equipment, that it just never gets done. Because well, it had to be thorough, right? For example, apparent conscientiousness can help to bury painful things. Is that also the motive? Only partly, I have the impression. Former top civil servants Peter van Lieshout and Geert Jan Hamilton recently told me: politics and the civil service have largely fallen into the hands of people who have let go of content and mainly organize processes.
If you pay attention, you will see it everywhere. Look what’s already on the smoking mess. I read a government piece called ‘covid-19 long-term strategy’. It’s 39 pages of nothing. rice pudding. As far as can be concluded, that is: citizens and companies, save yourself and if a monster variant should unexpectedly arise, we can always leave some extra corona patients to their fate or introduce a lockdown (or both). But then with a lot of advice and consultation. As if nothing is at stake.
Or take the anti-Russia sanctions that were never implemented in the Netherlands. In response to criticism, a bureaucratic buffer is created between the responsible ministers and the subject: a national coordinator, a steering committee, a project director, a task force. Among other things, they will ‘streamline coordination’.
Or look at the out-of-home children of victims of the benefits scandal. Everyone understands that returning is not an easy thing to do. But zero children reunited? Zero? Nevertheless, it is hard work. Because there is process, endless process everywhere. We have to wait for the Purchasing Power Loss Taskforce and the Energy Shortage Director, after a few more accidents.
And check it more closely? The ruling parties are behaving ominously. I don’t know if I’ve seen MPs act so shamelessly as PR staff for a cabinet before. It went on. Independent MP Omtzigt is vulnerable in the Van Lienden issue because he has also promoted his initiative himself, in the publicity and in the tower. Not good. VVD and D66 fully attack him. Tielen of the VVD repeatedly asked him to reveal his app traffic. Wasn’t he so for openness?
There are people who say: logical. Equal monks, equal hoods. They do not understand why checks and guarantees are in the constitution. The government has a duty to inform because the gigantic power of that government over our lives must be kept in check. So when Tielen makes no attempt at all to control the government, but takes the opportunity to deal with a colleague who does, it is nothing short of alarming. Where Baudet and other extremists hack into the democratic legal order from the outside, Tielen and the hairs hollow it out from within. Soon they will be able to shake hands with each other through the hole they have made together.
What do you get if career politicians as well as civil servants lack professional knowledge and turn their backs on the citizen? Geert Jan Hamilton, long-time clerk of the Senate, and top executive Peter van Lieshout argue in the Volkskrant podcast Rudderless by Kustaw Bessem’s revolutions to ensure that content and needs of ordinary people are once again decisive in The Hague: