Eurobloat #0023 • March 2012
March was the month the Union dressed up as a headmaster: it signed a treaty granting itself a red pen over national budgets, then immediately used it to dock a member state half a billion euros. To round things off, it went looking for its own taxes, because nothing says solidarity like a levy nobody voted for.
Folly of the Month: Hungary fined half a billion euros to encourage the others
On 13 March 2012 the Council, acting on a Commission proposal, voted to suspend 495 million euros of Cohesion Fund money earmarked for Hungary in 2013, the first time the Union had ever pulled this particular lever on a member state. The official reason was Budapest's failure to fix its excessive deficit; the unofficial reason was that Brussels had finally found a country small enough to make an example of. The money was meant for roads and pipes in one of the Union's poorer members, so the punishment for overspending was, naturally, to take away the spending. The suspension was quietly lifted weeks later once everyone had got the message, which rather suggests the point was never the deficit at all.
1. A treaty to make balanced budgets a constitutional duty
On 2 March 2012, twenty-five heads of government signed the Fiscal Compact, a treaty obliging members to write a balanced-budget rule into national law, preferably the constitution, and submit to Commission scrutiny when they stray. Britain and the Czech Republic declined to sign, which the Brussels press treated as a tragedy rather than the early warning it was.
2. Another 130 billion euros into the Greek furnace
On 14 March 2012 euro-area finance ministers signed off the second Greek bailout, committing the leftovers of the first rescue plus a fresh 130 billion euros for 2012 to 2014. Three years and two rescues into the experiment, the cure remained identical to the disease: more loans, more conditions, and the serene confidence that this time the arithmetic would behave.
→ economy-finance.ec.europa.eu
3. The Court rules that football fixtures are not Shakespeare
On 1 March 2012 the Court of Justice ruled in Football Dataco that a list of football fixtures is not protected by copyright merely because compiling it took effort, since copyright rewards intellectual creation rather than sweat. A sensible result, reached only after years of litigation across the Union about who owns the kick-off times, which tells you how much room the single market leaves for inventing new things to own.
4. Brussels goes shopping for taxes of its own
On 29 March 2012 the Economic and Social Committee blessed the Commission's drive for new "own resources", chief among them a financial transaction tax projected to raise some 57 billion euros a year, with the lion's share flowing straight to the EU budget. The pitch was financial "self-sufficiency", a phrase that here means an institution with no electorate acquiring a tax that no electorate approved.
5. One spectrum to rule them all
On 14 March 2012 Parliament and Council adopted the multiannual Radio Spectrum Policy Programme, a Union-wide plan for how member states are to parcel out their airwaves. Coordinating frequencies across borders is genuinely useful; the giveaway is that the answer is always a single programme run from the centre, never twenty-seven competent national regulators left to talk to each other.
6. The Commissioner who would fill your boardroom
In March 2012, having coaxed a grand total of twenty-four companies into signing her voluntary "Women on the Board Pledge", Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding launched a public consultation on EU-wide quotas instead. The voluntary route having politely declined to deliver the desired numbers, the natural next step was to consult on compelling them, which is the Brussels way of asking a question to which the answer is already legislation.
7. Capping the price of your holiday phone call, again
At the end of February the Industry committee voted by 55 to 5 to push roaming charges lower still and, for the first time, to cap the price of mobile data, with the full Parliament due to follow in spring. Setting prices across a continent from a committee room is presented as a gift to the consumer, and never as evidence that a body which cannot stop legislating will eventually legislate the cost of everything.
8. Hungary, the data protection authority, and the headmaster's cane
Alongside the cohesion money, the Commission kept up its infringement campaign against Budapest over the independence of its central bank, its data protection supervisor and its judges, eventually parking the last two before the Court of Justice. Whatever one makes of Hungary's laws, the spectacle of one capital being marched through the EU machinery on three fronts at once was less rule of law than ritual humiliation.
9. Half a trillion euros, conjured and barely mentioned
The European Central Bank's second three-year refinancing operation, settled on 29 February and dominating its March bulletin, pumped 529.5 billion euros into 800 banks at one per cent. Half a trillion euros summoned into existence to keep the show on the road, handed to the banks rather than the citizens, and waved through with the calm of an institution that answers to no parliament at all.
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