Eurobloat #0003 • July 2010
July 2010 was a busy month for the people who govern you without ever appearing on your ballot. They posted your bank statements to the United States, built themselves a foreign ministry, and then certified that the banks were fine.
Folly of the Month: Your bank records, posted to Washington
On 8 July the European Parliament, which had thrown out this very deal in February on the grounds that it shredded the privacy of half a billion people, decided on reflection that it rather liked it after all. By 484 votes to 109 it waved through the EU-US Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme, under which bulk financial messaging data held by SWIFT is handed to American authorities. The Parliament had discovered the principles it claimed to defend were negotiable once the Council frowned at it. Brussels calls this protecting Europeans. The Americans call it a useful filing cabinet.
→ edri.org
1. The EU builds itself a foreign office
On 26 July the Council adopted the decision establishing the European External Action Service, a brand new diplomatic corps answering to Brussels rather than to any nation that actually has soldiers, embassies or a flag people salute. Twenty-seven foreign policies were apparently not enough, so they commissioned a twenty-eighth and gave it the buildings.
2. Capping the bonuses of an industry it does not understand
On 7 July the Parliament voted by 625 to 28 to cap bankers' bonuses across the Union, ruling that no more than thirty per cent may be paid in cash and the rest dribbled out over years. Quite how a chamber that could not foresee the crisis became the body best placed to design pay packets for the people who could is never explained.
3. A new EU tax, dressed up as fairness
Fresh from rescuing the banks with your money, the Commission spent the summer of 2010 pressing the case for an EU-level levy on the financial sector, with the proceeds flowing not to the member states but directly into Brussels as a new own resource. The phrase to watch is always own resources, which is Eurospeak for a tax you cannot vote against because the people levying it were never elected to do so.
4. The banks are perfectly healthy, honestly
On 23 July the Committee of European Banking Supervisors published its stress tests and announced that 84 of 91 banks had passed with flying colours. The exercise was so rigorous that several of the institutions it pronounced sound required rescuing within months, and Ireland's banks, declared fit in July, helped sink the country into a bailout by November.
5. Brussels scolds France for enforcing its own borders
When Paris announced in July that it would clear illegal camps and return Roma migrants to Romania and Bulgaria, the Commission's first instinct was not to ask why free movement had produced squatter settlements but to threaten legal action against the member state trying to deal with them. A Union that cannot police its own external frontier reserves its energy for lecturing the nations that try.
6. Opening the door to a country that would walk back out
On 27 July the EU formally opened accession negotiations with Iceland, a nation of 320,000 people that had applied in a moment of post-crash panic. The enthusiasm was entirely on the Brussels side. Iceland eventually thought better of it, disbanded its negotiating team and withdrew, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the offer looks once the panic fades.
7. The Parliament has thoughts about your sausages
On 7 July MEPs spent their time deciding how meat from cloned animals and their offspring should be labelled, and whether food touched by nanotechnology deserved its own special category of warning sticker. The continent was on fire financially, so naturally the chamber turned to the urgent question of clone bratwurst, then failed to agree even on that.
8. A pay rise for the men grading everyone else's austerity
While the Commission lectured member states on belt-tightening, the annual adjustment that took effect on 1 July lifted the pay of its own officials, whose grades then ran up to over 18,000 euros a month. The Council, briefly remembering it answers to taxpayers, had tried to halve that increase on the grounds that the figures bore no relation to the recession ordinary Europeans were living through. The Commission took the matter to the Court of Justice and won.
9. Keeping the surveillance machine warm
In July the Commission wrote to member states gathering evidence to defend the Data Retention Directive, the scheme that logs who everyone called, emailed and texted, and when. The review was meant to question whether mass retention of innocent citizens' communications was justified. Instead it set about assembling the case for keeping it.
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