The Netherlands is once again a good European country, having bravely seen off calls for referendums and ratified the Lisbon treaty.

So perhaps now the time is right to starting piling on a bit of pressure on behalf of all those Europeans in Holland who would not have had a vote even if there had been a referendum here.
For while Brussels likes to involve itself in the dubious practise of forcing schools to put their text book shopping lists out to European tender and while members of the European parliament vote not to put their ridiculously generous expenses system up for public scrutiny – life is not getting any easier for the ordinary European.
Take pensions, for example. To claim a full Dutch state pension, you need to have lived here since the age of 15. No other European country is so tough.
The Netherlands also expects people to swap their perfectly good ‘foreign’ European driving licence for a good ‘Dutch’ one – not that the European courts agree.
And then there are the Europeans who have no say over what is done with their tax money because they have no vote in the country that they are living in – even if they have been there for decades.
Now we’ve got the treaty settled, it is time to ensure equal rights for Europeans who actually live and work in a single market.