Eurobloat #0007 • November 2010
November was the month the single currency began to come apart at the seams, and Brussels responded the only way it knows how: with a bigger bureaucracy, a court defeat of its own making, and a fresh plan to start taxing you directly.
Folly of the Month: Ireland gets an eighty-five billion euro "rescue" it did not want
On 28 November the Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF agreed an eighty-five billion euro programme for Ireland, complete with the now-familiar troika supervision and a menu of austerity dictated from abroad. Ireland did not ask to be saved so much as told it would be, because a wobble in Dublin threatened the bond yields of everyone else holding the euro. The country was made to put up seventeen and a half billion of its own pension reserve into the bargain, which is a curious sort of rescue. The single currency that was supposed to bind Europe in prosperity had instead bound a small nation to the decisions of its creditors.
1. The Court strikes down the EU's own scheme to publish farmers' names
On 9 November the Court of Justice ruled in the Schecke case that the EU's own rules forcing the publication of every farm-subsidy recipient's name and payment online breached the right to privacy. It is a fine thing when Brussels has to be saved from its own transparency drive by its own court, having never once asked whether naming every smallholder on the internet was proportionate.
2. A brand-new diplomatic service nobody elected
The European External Action Service was cleared to begin work from 1 December, drawing on roughly 3,700 staff and around 135 missions worldwide, with the Parliament having waved through extra millions in October to get it going. Europe now has its own foreign office and its own ambassadors, none of whom answer to any voter, all to deliver a foreign policy the member states cannot actually agree on.
3. The Commission decides it needs a tax of its own
In its EU Budget Review of 19 October, still being chewed over through November, the Commission floated six possible "own resources" and warmed to the idea of an EU-level financial transaction tax and a new EU VAT slice. The point of an "own resource" is that the money would flow to Brussels without first passing through a national treasury or a national vote, which is to say without anyone in a member state being able to say no.
4. The 2011 budget collapses in a power grab over "own resources"
On 15 November Parliament's negotiators announced the 2011 budget talks had hit deadlock, with budgets chairman Alain Lamassoure declaring that reform of the EU's own resources had "become inevitable". Parliament had its modest 2.91 per cent rise within reach but held the whole budget hostage to win a bigger say over how the Union raises money. The institution that already spends your money wanted a firmer grip on collecting it too.
5. Parliament gives a cautious nod to ACTA
On 24 November the Parliament passed a resolution welcoming the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement as "a step in the right direction", while limply asking the Commission to confirm it would not trample basic freedoms. A treaty negotiated largely in secret, with real implications for what gets monitored and blocked online, and the elected chamber's instinct was to applaud first and request reassurances afterwards.
6. A "comprehensive approach" to your personal data
On 4 November Commissioner Reding launched a communication promising a "comprehensive approach" to personal data, opening a consultation that ran to January and laying the track for what would eventually become a single EU-wide data regime. Comprehensive is the operative word: the plan was to pull data rules up from the member states and standardise them from Brussels, in the name of protecting you from everyone except the people writing the rules.
7. Fifty new ways to perfect the single market
On 27 October the Commission unveiled "Towards a Single Market Act", a tidy list of fifty proposals to relaunch a single market that has existed since 1992, with the Council endorsing the thrust of it in December. After eighteen years one might think the market would run itself, yet every few years it apparently needs another fifty interventions to be made whole, each one a fresh reason for officials in Brussels to stay busy.
8. Montenegro invited to the queue
On 9 November the Commission recommended granting Montenegro candidate status, duly confirmed by the European Council in December. With the euro buckling and Ireland on the operating table, the priority was apparently to line up the next member, on the cheerful assumption that a club this troubled mainly needs more people inside it.
9. Contagion arrives on schedule
By late November Portuguese ten-year yields had climbed to around 7 per cent and Spanish yields to about 5.2 per cent, as markets worked out that the Irish "firewall" had merely shown investors which country to bet against next. The single currency, sold as a shield, turned out to be a chain: the moment one link gave way, every other started to strain.
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