PParliamentary surveys often arrive late. Just when you think everything has been said about a theme, the House of Representatives comes up with its own investigation. But that can be explained: every survey starts with a widely shared but slowly growing idea that something has gone completely wrong somewhere. On topics such as the fall of Srebrenica, construction fraud, the banking crisis, the Surcharge Affair and Groningen gas extraction, the House was united at the start of the surveys in the belief that the government had made mistakes. And also in the thought of where the problem was.
Often so many external studies have preceded this that surveys no longer provide splitting new insights. But that is not always the goal. The self-cleaning capacity of politics is paramount: which missteps should we never commit again?
The newspaper’s position is expressed in the Volkskrant Commentary. It is the result of a discussion between the commentators and the editor-in-chief.
Seen in this light, the desire to organize a survey about corona policy is very easy to explain. And yet the question is whether the House itself is the appropriate party to bring this investigation to a successful conclusion. After all, the necessary foundation for a survey is completely lacking: a widely shared view of what went wrong. This House could easily spend a week debating whether something went wrong.
This is of course not about the obvious questions about why the Netherlands was not better prepared for a pandemic, how the purchasing policy for aids could degenerate into Wild West scenes, whether it was smart to also link corona admission tickets to the vaccination campaign, why the testing started so slowly and how it came about that the Netherlands was still in a lockdown even at the beginning of 2022.
These are important questions, but they must now be answered by a committee that intrinsically disagrees on the basic issue: was there a serious threat to public health in the first place? According to at least one member of the committee, we cannot speak of ministers who may have made mistakes in the process, but of a orchestrated international conspiracy by administrators ‘to exclude millions of people’, on the basis of a ‘major hoax’. The same Pepijn van Houwelingen (Forum for Democracy) is also the man who announced that ‘tribunals’ will be established to try ‘the greatest deception in human history’.
How should such a group come together? Van Houwelingen was openly sent to the committee by his party leader with the assignment to ‘drive those people completely crazy’. Is it conceivable that he will soon, for example, agree with the conclusion that the cabinet sometimes had to weigh different fundamental rights against each other under great time pressure and has generally tried to do so conscientiously and as proportionately as possible, if the rest of the committee were convinced of that? come?
There is still plenty of research to be done into the corona years and it is hoped that this committee will be a great success, but the chance of a political accident is greater.
Tags: hoped corona committee success chance political accident greater
