Europe’s unvaccinated don’t take kindly to being turned into second-class citizens

These are dangerous times in the Netherlands. Anti-lockdown mobs have torched cars, thrown rocks and attacked the police. In Rotterdam, police used live fire, in scenes more reminiscent of New York or LA than the birthplace of Erasmus. The protests are ostensibly in response to government plans to restrict the use of indoor spaces only to people with a Covid pass, showing they have been vaccinated or they have recovered from the virus. The (unvaccinated) Dutch — very much a minority — don’t take kindly to being turned into second-class citizens.

Frank Paauw, Amsterdam’s tall, silver-haired police chief, suspects darker forces are at work. I met him during a TV interview, his gun conspicuous by its presence. Some protestors are likening themselves — obscenely — to the Dutch resistance against Nazi occupation, while hooligans and the far right are coordinating via WhatsApp and Facebook. Message to Nick Clegg in Menlo Park, California: this is not the metaverse, it’s reality. Paauw warned last month that the Netherlands was no longer ‘Europe’s quiet hamlet’, following the murder of a top TV reporter investigating organised crime and drugs trafficking. Mark Rutte, the long-serving Prime Minister, has grudgingly accepted heightened police security and, for now, has abandoned his bike.

My trip to Amsterdam was to promote the paperback version of my book, The Powerful and the Damned, a private diary recorded during my 14 years as editor of the Financial Times. My first appearance was on Buitenhof, NPO public television’s Sunday current-affairs show, alongside the police chief, two politicians and a virologist. My fellow interloper was Mary Trump, a psychiatrist and The Donald’s hyper-critical niece. She is also the author of Too Much and Never Enough, which sold one million copies on publication day.