Eurobloat #0019 • November 2011
With the euro on fire, Brussels spent November 2011 deciding what bottled water may legally claim, installing two governments nobody voted for, and publishing a thirty-eight-page paper on how to make Germany guarantee Greece's overdraft.
Folly of the Month: Brussels rules that water does not prevent dehydration
After a three-year investigation, twenty-one scientists assembled in Parma and concluded that drink manufacturers may no longer claim that regular consumption of water reduces the risk of dehydration. The reasoning, briefly, is that dehydration is a state of reduced water in the body, and water cannot prevent a condition defined by a lack of water, which is the kind of sentence that gets written when a continent has too many spare bureaucrats. Producers face a two-year jail term if they defy the edict, which entered the rulebook in late November. The euro was collapsing; the Commission was busy protecting Europeans from the suggestion that they should drink.
→ foodmanufacture.co.uk → outsidethebeltway.com
1. The Commission proposes to vet national budgets before parliaments see them
On 23 November the Commission unveiled its "two-pack", two regulations giving Brussels the power to demand revisions to eurozone members' draft budgets before national parliaments have voted on them. It is sold as coordination. In practice it is a schoolmaster in Brussels marking the homework of elected governments and sending it back for corrections.
2. A green paper on making everyone guarantee everyone else's debt
On the same busy day the Commission published a green paper on "Stability Bonds", a tasteful rebrand of eurobonds, offering three flavours of jointly issued debt. Barroso called open debate one of his institution's duties and urged members to approach the question free of dogma, by which he meant free of the German objection to underwriting other countries' borrowing. The cure for a debt crisis, apparently, is more shared debt.
3. The financial transaction tax becomes an EU "own resource"
On 9 November the Commission amended its own-resources proposal so that a slice of the planned financial transaction tax would flow directly to the EU budget. The point was never really the tax. The point was a revenue stream Brussels collects for itself, without the inconvenience of asking national treasuries each year.
4. Credit agencies told when they are allowed to rate countries
On 15 November the Commission proposed rules requiring agencies to publish sovereign ratings only after the close of business and at least an hour before EU trading venues reopened. Having borrowed too much, the answer was not to borrow less but to regulate the messengers who keep noticing. The ratings were the problem, you understand, not the debts.
5. Italy gets a prime minister from the Berlaymont
On 16 November Mario Monti, former European Commissioner for the internal market and then competition, was sworn in as Italy's prime minister at the head of a cabinet containing not one elected politician. Brussels did not need to win an Italian election. It simply supplied the winner.
6. Greece gets a central banker installed too
Five days earlier, on 11 November, Lucas Papademos, lately vice-president of the European Central Bank, was installed as prime minister of Greece to lead a government of national unity that the nation had not been asked to vote for. Two of Europe's older democracies, both quietly handed to men whose chief qualification was a reassuring CV from Frankfurt and Brussels.
7. The Court of Justice strikes down blanket internet filtering
On 24 November, in Scarlet v SABAM, the Court of Justice ruled that a national court may not order an internet provider to install a system filtering all of its customers' traffic, indefinitely and at its own cost, to hunt for copyright infringement. A rare sensible result, which is worth noting only because a court somewhere had been happy to wave the surveillance machine through in the first place.
8. The Schengen door stays shut, and that is fine
Through the autumn the Council kept Bulgaria and Romania out of the passport-free Schengen zone, with several capitals citing corruption and organised crime. Brussels frames this as a borders embarrassment. For anyone who thinks borders should be controlled by the people who live behind them, it is one of the saner things the Council managed all year.
9. A fresh decade of food-labelling rules hits the statute book
On 22 November Regulation 1169/2011 on food information to consumers was published in the Official Journal, forty-six pages dictating minimum font sizes, mandatory nutrition declarations and allergen typography across the continent. It was generously phased in over years, which is the EU's way of admitting that nobody could actually comply at once. The simplification, as ever, was a thicker rulebook.
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