Eurobloat #0025 • May 2012
May 2012 was the month the eurozone burned and the Commission reached, as ever, for more Europe: a tax, a summit, a set of school reports for grown nation states, and a fresh rulebook for the labelling of jumpers.
Folly of the Month: Brussels hands out school reports to sovereign nations
On 30 May the Commission published its country-specific recommendations under the European Semester, a tidy stack of instructions telling twenty-seven sovereign governments how to run their own budgets, pensions and labour laws. Unelected officials, having helped engineer the very debt crisis they were now lecturing about, appointed themselves headmaster and handed out grades to the member states paying their salaries. The polite word was guidance. The honest word was a transfer of economic sovereignty from national parliaments to a building in Brussels, dressed up as helpful advice nobody had asked for.
→ commission.europa.eu → ec.europa.eu
1. A new EU tax that the EU could not actually pass
On 23 May the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly, 487 to 152, to back a Financial Transaction Tax, and helpfully added that it should go ahead even if only some member states wanted it. A tax the Council would shortly confirm it could not agree on, cheered through anyway, with MEPs musing that the proceeds could one day flow into the EU budget and shrink national contributions. Brussels had found a way to want your money before it had found a way to take it.
2. The cure for too much Europe is more Europe
At an informal leaders' dinner in Brussels on 23 May, the assembled heads of government chewed over eurobonds, a bigger European Investment Bank and the recycling of structural funds, while a continent drowned in joint liabilities it had already taken on. The prescription for a debt crisis built by pooling risk was, naturally, to pool more risk. Van Rompuy was duly tasked with writing yet another report on deeper union.
3. Not a power grab, insists the woman grabbing the power
On 3 May, Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding told Europe's data protection authorities that the delegated acts in her sweeping data protection regulation were absolutely not an undemocratic power grab by the Commission. She felt the need to say this because everyone had noticed that they were. A reform sold as protecting citizens quietly handed Brussels the standing power to rewrite the rules whenever it pleased, which is precisely the sort of thing you reassure people about only when it is true.
4. A committee accidentally does the right thing on ACTA
On 31 May the Parliament's industry committee became the latest to recommend rejecting ACTA, the global treaty that civil-liberties groups warned would license mass monitoring of what people did online. After the legal affairs and civil liberties committees had already said no, the surveillance treaty was collapsing committee by committee. A rare and welcome outbreak of sense, even if it took street protests across the continent to produce it.
5. The most comprehensive overhaul of the rules it wrote itself
On 8 May the Commission launched State Aid Modernisation, billed as a streamlining of state aid control and the most comprehensive overhaul in its history. One marvels that the rules needed the most comprehensive overhaul in history, given who wrote them in the first place. Two years of consultation later, the simplified regime would arrive, and nobody in Brussels would be held to account for the decade of complexity it replaced.
6. Brussels sets the price of your phone call
The 2012 roaming regulation, ground through Parliament and Council that spring, capped what mobile operators across the continent could charge for calls, texts and data. A single committee in Brussels, having decided it knew the correct price of a megabyte better than any market, simply set it by decree. Consumers cheered the lower bill and were encouraged not to ask who else gets to fix prices from a desk in Belgium.
7. The Union that can name your jumper
From 8 May the Textile Fibre Names Regulation became fully applicable, decreeing that only the fibre names on an approved Brussels list may appear on the label of any garment sold in the Union. A continent in financial freefall found the institutional energy to police the vocabulary of a sock. Misdescribe your cotton blend at your peril, for the single market has standards, even when it has no growth.
8. A resolution for the young people Brussels helped put out of work
On 24 May the Parliament adopted a resolution on the Youth Opportunities Initiative, wringing its hands over record youth unemployment across the eurozone. The hands doing the wringing belonged to the same institution whose single currency and austerity recipes had helped put a generation of southern Europeans on the dole. The remedy, as ever, was a strongly worded resolution and a new EU initiative rather than any admission of cause.
9. Brussels takes a member state to court for not spying on its citizens
On 31 May the Commission hauled Germany before the Court of Justice, demanding a fine of 315,036 euros for every single day until Berlin agreed to keep records of who its citizens telephoned and emailed. Germany's own constitutional court had struck down blanket data retention as a breach of fundamental rights, so the Commission proposed to punish a nation, at over three hundred thousand euros a day, for the crime of declining to surveil its own people. The villain here is not Berlin.
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