The Weekly Forum - 27 November
07 december 2025 | Forum for Democracy Intl
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – ‘Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence’ - is heavily used by the European Court to overrule states. In 2024, for instance, Strasbourg invoked it to punish Switzerland for not doing enough to save the planet! How odd, therefore, that its specific insistence on the privacy of correspondence is being savagely attacked by the European Commission, which is demanding ‘chat control’, the electronic surveillance of all text messages by service providers. The Stasi used to steam open envelopes to read people’s letters: this EU measure will make East German totalitarianism look like a vicarage tea party. As usual, only FVD protests. Pepijn van Houwelingen MP raised the issue in committee recently, as the Commission is now bringing back its proposal in a new form even though it was defeated in the Council only last month. Given that the Commission is also proposing to create its own intelligence service, we all need to be afraid, very afraid.
Watch Pepijn’s speech here (translated by AI)
Meanwhile, Socialism is alive and well as a political ideology and not just as a totalitarian practice. In a debate in the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament recently, a Socialist MP said that the current tax system was unfair because it allows the rich to remain too wealthy. Thierry Baudet tackled him on this. Why is it unfair if some people have more money than others? The MP replied that ‘working people’ deserved to keep their money but that rich people do not. But how, Thierry asked, do rich people get rich? Do they not work also for their money, maybe perhaps even harder than others? Alternatively, did their parents not work for it, if it is inherited wealth, and should people not have the right to give the money to their children? The claim that only labour is a legitimate source of wealth is thus not just ideological but also profound nonsense. Work is at the source of all wealth, whether it is a meagre salary or a large fortune, and therefore labour cannot be a criterion for the supposed legitimacy or illegitimacy of someone’s financial position.
The director of FVD’s cultural body, the Renaissance Institute, Peter van Duijvenvoorde MP, has asked the Dutch government a very simple question. Why are the new higher levels of defence spending going to foreign arms manufacturers and not to Dutch ones? Donald Trump’s vision of the world is based on wealth extraction – in this case from America’s colonies in Europe and the Far East (Japan). Thus, at his golf resort in Scotland in the summer, he obtained from the EU the agreement to spend hundreds of billions of euros on US weapons. Europe is paying for the reindustrialisation of America while suffering de-industrialisation itself because it has to buy American liquefied natural gas rather than cheaper Russian gas. In short, Europe is being comprehensively shafted by the Atlanticist political cabal.
Read Peter van Duijvenvoorde’s questions here
Ian Proud, a former British diplomat, was our guest on The Forum this week to discuss the various ‘peace plans’ being discussed for Ukraine. Ian is convinced that Trump genuinely wants a ‘win’, i.e. a peace agreement, and that the coming days will show whether or not the key issue of NATO membership for Ukraine will be taken off the table. If you missed the show, you can listen back here.