‘The Netherlands is waiting for more cooperation’

GroenLinks and the PvdA are joining forces during the Provincial Council elections. Vos calls that exciting. ‘How do you merge? How do you ensure that a new team starts working together?’ What Vos also wonders is to what extent it is still useful to speak of the contrast between the right and the left: ‘Is that what the Netherlands is waiting for at a time when we are really brimming with crises? No, the Netherlands is waiting for more cooperation, for people to look each other in the eye again and for us to solve problems.’

Differences magnified

According to Vos, the differences are ‘greatly magnified’. She does not deny the differences, but wants a focus on solving the problems. ‘We do see that this cabinet is struggling to make decisions. You can see that in the nitrogen dossier, but also, for example, in the labor market. There is of course a big difference in ideology and image of humanity between, for example, the VVD and the PvdA. The VVD trusts people less than the PvdA would like to do. The VVD has a different idea about taxes and the structure of society than the PvdA.’

The Netherlands is faced with countless problems, the biggest of which is housing, says Vos. And that has to do with a whole chain of other problems. But if you can’t live affordably, which is the case for too many people at the moment, then you can’t function either.’ However, Vos points out that the problem of housing is closely related to two other issues: climate and nitrogen. ‘Because if you don’t solve the nitrogen problem, you can’t build.’

Bad debate

And so Vos returns to the apparent contradiction: housing and asylum policy as linked by Annabel Nanninga of JA21. ‘That is typically a false dichotomy that really spoils the debate.’ According to Vos, this distracts from the real problem: too few houses, too few buildings, the nitrogen problem. ‘So I think that the asylum problem is really a problem in the debate.’

Listen

What politicians should do more: ‘Listen, listen, listen. When I listen to people in the neighbourhood, or if you listen to farmers who really just want to farm normally, for example, they often contain solutions to problems that you cannot come up with from The Hague at all. I think that must also be the agenda for the coming years and also for the provinces. And then it turns out that many more things can be done. Only there are rules in the way, rules based on distrust.’

Distrust = rules

According to Vos, rules are the outcome of a suspicious government. ‘I notice that distrust is the core behind a lot of rules. A lot of rules in healthcare, so that people who try to work in healthcare are only accounting for what they have done every five minutes. You see that in education, in childcare, which means that it is no longer fun to work in childcare. You can see that now with the handling of the damage in Groningen, in the handling of the child benefit affair.’

delete

According to Vos, we spend 70 percent of our time on rules due to distrust. If GroenLinks and the PvdA are given the say, that will change, she says. she hopes. ‘Finally a different management culture for once, I hope, namely that we do start from the good in people and that we might let go of a lot of rules. For example, that we have communities, farmers in villages, that we just let them find their own solutions for a while.’

The left-wing parties are also going to scrap rules in healthcare, as well as in education. In education, the left wants to ‘just let teachers do what they are good at. And then hopefully I will notice that we need far fewer agencies that arrange self-employed persons in education or self-employed persons in healthcare, for example, because it is nice to work in healthcare again.’

Listen to the entire conversation in BNR’s Big Five here