Eurobloat #0020 • December 2011
December was the month the European project decided that the cure for too much central control was a great deal more of it. The continent agreed to surrender its budgets to Brussels, the central bank quietly printed half a trillion euros, and the only man who walked out was treated as the villain of the piece.
Folly of the Month: Twenty-six leaders agree to grade their own homework
At the summit of 8 and 9 December the eurozone, plus a clutch of hopeful onlookers, agreed a "fiscal compact" that would write balanced-budget rules into national constitutions and impose near-automatic sanctions on deficit offenders unless a three-quarters majority votes to stop them. The remedy for a crisis caused by Brussels failing to enforce its own rules was, naturally, to hand Brussels more rules to fail to enforce. David Cameron, asking only that the City of London be spared a new financial transactions levy, declined to sign and was promptly cast as Neville Chamberlain by people who had spent the previous decade ignoring the Stability and Growth Pact. He sat alone; the other twenty-six agreed to march their national parliaments off to ratify a treaty drafted at four in the morning.
1. The printing press finds an extra €489 billion down the back of the sofa
On 21 December the European Central Bank lent 523 banks the tidy sum of €489 billion for three years at one per cent, having cut its main rate to that same one per cent a fortnight earlier. It is not a bailout, you understand. It is merely half a trillion euros handed to the banks that bought the bonds that funded the governments that broke the rules.
2. Brussels declares war on your washing powder
On 14 December MEPs voted to make detergents almost phosphorus-free, capping a standard dose of washing powder at half a gram of phosphorus from 2013 and your dishwasher tablet at three-tenths of a gram by 2017. Twenty-seven nations, one central bank teetering, and the Parliament found time to legislate the precise chemistry of your kitchen sink.
3. A union in crisis decides this is the moment to grow
On 9 December, in the margins of the very summit where the euro was unravelling, the leaders signed Croatia's accession treaty, the Parliament having given its blessing on 1 December. Nothing says confidence in the project quite like recruiting a twenty-eighth passenger as the ship takes on water.
4. Surveillance gets a friendly little "consultation"
On 15 December the Commission circulated a paper, "Consultation on reform of Data Retention Directive: emerging themes and next steps", on reworking the law that obliges your phone company to log who you call and when, on the off chance the state should later wish to know. The directive was already being shredded in national courts as a breach of basic rights, so Brussels set about discussing not whether to keep blanket retention, but how to dress it up better next time.
5. One permit to rule them all
On 13 December the Parliament adopted the Single Permit Directive, a combined work-and-residence card for non-EU nationals that conveniently came bundled with a "common set of rights". A bloc that cannot agree how to control its own external border instead harmonised the paperwork for letting people through it, and called the result migration management.
6. The orange-juice police are on patrol
Among December's pressing business the Parliament debated new labelling rules so that consumers might at last discover whether sweeteners had been added to their fruit juice. One trembles to imagine how Europeans navigated the carton aisle for the preceding two thousand years without a directive to guide their hand.
7. A new procurement rulebook, sold as simplification
On 20 December the Commission unveiled fresh public-procurement directives to "modernise and simplify" how governments buy things, replacing rules that were themselves once sold as modern and simple. The genuine fix, of course, would be for Brussels to buy less and command less; instead member states received a thicker manual on how to obey.
→ cms.law
8. A directive to protect victims, written for everyone's benefit but the member states'
The December plenary advanced EU-wide rules to extend protection orders for victims of stalking, harassment and violence across borders. A worthy aim, undoubtedly, and one national courts had managed for centuries, but every cross-border directive is another field where the last word drifts quietly from your capital to Luxembourg.
9. The mighty Union cannot agree to be tough on Iran
On 1 December the EU's foreign ministers met to discuss sanctions on Iran's nuclear programme, talked sternly about the energy sector, and then agreed to agree later, kicking any actual oil embargo into the new year. Twenty-seven foreign policies in one room produced precisely one outcome: a press line promising firm action at the next meeting.
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