Eurobloat #0024 • April 2012
April was the month the European Parliament voted to ship every air passenger's records to the American government, the budget men drew up a tax of their very own, and a court in Luxembourg told a province in Italy how to spend its housing money. The euro, meanwhile, quietly caught fire again.
Folly of the Month: Your holiday, filed in Washington for fifteen years
On 19 April the European Parliament approved the EU-US agreement handing Passenger Name Record data, who you fly with, when, your seat, your meal, your payment card, to the United States Department of Homeland Security. The numbers tell their own story: terrorism data may be kept for fifteen years, other serious crime for ten, and the rapporteur, Sophie in 't Veld, was so unhappy with the safeguards that she took her own name off the report. The vote passed 409 to 226. So the institution that spends the rest of the year sermonising about the sanctity of personal data cheerfully posted yours to another continent, then congratulated itself on the deal.
1. The EU invents a tax for itself
On 25 April the Parliament's economic affairs committee adopted the Podimata report on a financial transaction tax, complete with an "issuance principle" reaching outside the EU's borders and a plan to pour a share of the proceeds straight into Brussels' own budget. Nothing says "ever closer union" like a levy the member states never asked for, designed to wean the EU off the money those same member states currently control.
2. Brussels comes for Apple's e-books
In April the Commission collected settlement offers from Apple and four publishers over e-book pricing, the opening act of a probe it would not close until 13 December. The competition machine that struggles to deliver a single market in services found plenty of energy to police the price of paperbacks people read on a tablet.
→ lexgo.be
3. France and Germany ask for their borders back
On 17 April the French and German interior ministers wrote to Brussels demanding the power to reintroduce internal border controls for thirty days at a time. After years of being told that frontiers were a relic, the two largest Schengen members quietly concluded that a nation might wish to decide who crosses into it. A rare flash of sense, promptly treated as heresy.
→ wsws.org
4. The EU dithers while Argentina helps itself to a Spanish company
On 23 April the bloc's foreign ministers met to consider Argentina's seizure of YPF from Spain's Repsol, and decided to decide later. The grand common foreign policy, confronted with the expropriation of one of its own flagship firms, produced a communique and a promise to revisit the matter at the next meeting.
5. Spain burns and the union watches
Through April the IMF warned of a crisis of unprecedented proportion in the Spanish financial sector while bond markets turned on Madrid. The euro, that monument to political will over economic sense, would need a hundred-billion-euro bank rescue by June. The single currency was once again saved only by promising even more of itself.
6. Brussels grades Hungary and sends it to court
On 25 April the Commission, satisfied at last with Hungary's central bank changes, referred the country to the Court of Justice over its data protection authority and its judges. The schoolmaster of Europe had found a member state's domestic constitutional arrangements wanting, and reached for the cane rather than the dialogue it forever recommends to everyone else.
7. A sermon for the jobless
On 18 April the Commission unveiled its employment package, "Towards a job-rich recovery", a communication, nine staff working documents and two consultations aimed at a continent where unemployment had passed ten per cent. Faced with millions out of work, Brussels produced paperwork, public consultations and a slogan, then asked the member states to please create the jobs themselves.
8. Luxembourg tells Bolzano how to spend its housing budget
On 24 April the Court of Justice ruled in Kamberaj that an Italian province could not allocate a smaller housing-benefit pot to long-term resident non-EU nationals than to others. Whatever the merits, the practical lesson was familiar: a regional budget decision taken in Bolzano now answered to thirteen judges in Luxembourg.
9. The right-to-strike regulation nobody wanted
The Commission's "Monti II" proposal of late March, telling member states how their workers might exercise the right to take collective action, ran into trouble through April as the capitals bristled. Twelve national parliaments then raised the first ever subsidiarity "yellow card", the threshold reached on 22 May, judging that Brussels had reached into a matter that was none of its business. The Commission would withdraw the whole thing by September, having achieved nothing but a reminder that the capitals can still say no.
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