Eurobloat #0030 • October 2012
October was the month the European Union pinned a peace medal on its own chest while its euro burned, one of its commissioners walked the plank over a tobacco bribe, and its lawyers had to inform the Commission that its flagship equality law would be against the law. A vintage month.
Folly of the Month: The EU awards itself the Nobel Peace Prize
On 12 October the Norwegian Nobel Committee handed the European Union the Nobel Peace Prize for six decades of advancing peace and reconciliation. The timing was exquisite. While the Committee praised the continent's harmony, Greek pensioners were rioting, Spanish youth unemployment had passed fifty per cent, and German and southern voters were rediscovering exactly the resentments the prize claimed to have abolished. Brussels, never a body to let a crisis interrupt a sermon, accepted the honour with the straightest of faces and dispatched both President Van Rompuy and President Barroso to Oslo so that no single official should be deprived of the photograph.
→ nobelprize.org → en.wikipedia.org
1. Brussels resolves to supervise your bank
At the European Council on 18 and 19 October, leaders agreed to hand the European Central Bank supervision over euro area banks it had never met, setting the objective of finishing the legislative framework for a single supervisory mechanism by 1 January 2013. Naturally the surveillance arrived first and the shared liability was promised for later, which is the customary order of these things.
2. The boardroom quota that turned out to be illegal
On 23 October the Commission was due to wave through Viviane Reding's mandatory forty per cent quota for women on company boards, only for its own legal service to advise that such a quota would breach the EU treaties, with several commissioners ready to vote it down. The proposal was quietly postponed. When even Brussels lawyers tell you the centralisation is unlawful, you might consider that a hint rather than a scheduling problem.
3. Eleven countries volunteer for a new EU tax
Also on 23 October the Commission proposed authorising eleven member states to press ahead with a financial transaction tax under "enhanced cooperation", the first time the device had been used for taxation. A levy the whole Union had refused was thus rebranded as a coalition of the willing, which is how the EU teaches you that no rejected idea is ever truly dead.
4. The Commission charges Microsoft for a missing screen
On 24 October the Commission issued a formal Statement of Objections accusing Microsoft of failing to show European users a browser-choice screen, raising the prospect of a fine of up to ten per cent of global turnover, some seven billion dollars. An entire enforcement apparatus, mobilised because a pop-up menu had gone absent without leave.
5. Dalligate: a commissioner and a snus bribe
On 16 October Health Commissioner John Dalli was pushed out by Barroso after an anti-fraud investigation linked an associate to a sixty million euro solicitation from Swedish Match to lift the EU ban on snus. Just as the Commission prepared to dictate to half a billion people what tobacco they may buy, it transpired that the price of the policy was, allegedly, negotiable.
6. MEPs demand a bigger budget, austerity notwithstanding
At the 23 October plenary, Parliament voted its position on the 2013 budget, pressing for 137.9 billion euros in payments and 151.15 billion in commitments, a rise of 6.82 per cent on the year in payments as it sought to restore the cuts the Council had made. Across the Union governments were cutting to the bone, and in Strasbourg the response to the squeeze was to ask, politely but firmly, for more.
7. The schoolmaster issues its annual report cards
On 10 October the Commission published its enlargement package, grading Serbia, Turkey and the rest on their progress towards the approved European standard. The same Union that could not balance its own currency or its own books nonetheless found the confidence to mark everyone else's homework, while courting Ankara for the privilege.
8. The EU discovers the red tape it laid itself
On 1 October the Commission opened a consultation inviting small firms to name the ten most burdensome EU laws weighing on them, promising in due course to lighten the load. A welcome impulse, marred only by the small matter that Brussels had drafted, debated and imposed every one of those burdens itself, and that nobody was to be held to account for the years lost beneath them.
9. The Court overrules the airlines and the British regulator
On 23 October the Court of Justice ruled in Nelson and TUI Travel that passengers delayed three hours or more are owed standardised compensation, brushing aside the airlines and the position of the United Kingdom's own Civil Aviation Authority. A national regulator's judgement, set aside in Luxembourg, so that the obligation could be fixed continent-wide whether the member state agreed or not.
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