Fair play to the Dutch people for (re?)-electing a centre left local govt who have the courage to stand up to the minority centre right coalition govt and made it possible for this experiment to continue.
@Sychonaut 505495 wrote:
Always good news. They would be fools to ban tourist from it in the ‘dam though. I’d imagine they would lose alot of money and tourism.
Dutch folk are no fools, but they have taken a calculated business risk. there are costs to the public purse as well as benefits, but the greater self discipline and sense of community in NL reduces these costs and risks.
Amsterdam and the surrounding regions are similar to Ipswich, Norwich and East Anglia in many other ways, geography, demographics, key industries etc (and is a strategically important city/urban area but not a capital) although those parts of NL are as densley populated as London – they cram way more people into the same size area.
But because we do not have as much self discipline and sense of community (or just common sense) here, a greater level of tolerance in the UK is currently unthinkable. When they tried in the 90s/2000s to make East Anglia a party area similar to London, it went pear shaped in a very short order of time and folk died due to anythiing from overdoses to gang fights over drugs turf. Even house and trance DJ’s were beating the shit out of one another outside clubs FFS! Ironically the cops and Council used the policing and surveillance methods from Holland to deal with the problems and set boundaries.
