Eurobloat #0033 • January 2013
January opened with Ireland clutching the rotating gavel and a slogan about stability, jobs and growth, which is the slogan they always reach for when there is none of any. By the end of the month eleven governments had been licensed to tax each other, a serving British prime minister had said the unsayable, and the European beef supply had turned out to be partly horse.
Folly of the Month: Eleven countries given permission to invent a tax
On 22 January the Council adopted Decision 2013/52/EU, authorising "enhanced cooperation" so that Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia and Slovakia could build a common Financial Transaction Tax between themselves. The marketing word is "cooperation"; the mechanism is a subset of the EU writing a tax and pretending it is a club rule rather than a levy. The justification, helpfully, was to prevent "distortions" caused by member states acting unilaterally, which is Brussels-speak for the distortion of a country deciding its own tax policy. Four governments, including the United Kingdom, declined to applaud, which under the new arithmetic counts as obstruction rather than sovereignty.
1. A prime minister says the quiet part out loud
On 23 January, at Bloomberg's London office, David Cameron promised to renegotiate Britain's membership and then put it to an in-out referendum. It was the first serious Eurosceptic speech from a sitting prime minister since Bruges, and Brussels reacted as if a guest had asked to read the bill. The system that calls itself irreversible had just been told, politely, that it was optional.
2. The single market for beef turns out to contain horse
On 15 January the Irish food safety authority revealed that frozen beefburgers sold across Britain and Ireland contained undeclared horse and pig DNA, with one Tesco line testing at 29 per cent horse. This was the borderless, harmonised, traceable single market in action, in which a product can cross three countries and arrive labelled as the wrong animal. Decades of EU food law, and the one thing nobody could trace was the meat.
3. A German Green starts redrafting the internet
On 8 January the Parliament's civil liberties committee received Jan Philipp Albrecht's draft report on the proposed Data Protection Regulation, the document that would grow into the sprawl now known as GDPR. The Commissioner waved away the "predictions of doom", which is reassuring from people who write rules first and read the consequences later. The result would be cookie banners on every page in Europe and a fresh excuse to fine American companies for serving Europeans.
4. Ireland takes the wheel of the recovery it is still inside
On 1 January Ireland assumed the rotating presidency, badged as the "recovery presidency", while still living inside its own EU-IMF bailout. The headline mission for the six months was to land the seven-year, roughly 960-billion-euro budget, because nothing says austerity like negotiating a trillion in slow motion. A country grades the others on prudence while a foreign troika still signs its cheques.
5. The unitary patent quietly comes into force
The two unitary patent regulations, voted through in December, entered into force in January 2013, with a Unified Patent Court treaty waiting to be signed in February. It was sold as cutting costs and red tape, which it might even do, after first creating a brand new EU court to administer it. Simplification, in Brussels, always arrives carrying its own new institution.
6. Two parliaments meet to demand more of themselves
On 22 January the Bundestag and the French National Assembly held a joint session in Berlin to mark fifty years of the Elysee Treaty, and resolved a declaration calling for "more integration" at the administrative level. Half a century of partnership, and the agreed conclusion was that there should be more apparatus. The continent's answer to every anniversary is the same: another layer.
7. Brussels marks the homework of member states
On 24 January the Commission issued its monthly infringement package, opening and escalating cases against governments for failing to transpose its directives on schedule. The schoolmaster posture is now routine: capitals are not partners but pupils, and tardiness is met with a referral to the Court rather than a conversation. Twenty-seven sovereign states, one report card.
8. MEPs vote to make the farm rules slightly less mad
In late January the Parliament's agriculture committee voted to soften the Commission's "greening" plan, cutting the proposed ecological set-aside and the three-crop rule and asking for less bureaucracy. The reform was welcome; the tell is that the burden being trimmed was invented by the same institution a year earlier. They build the maze, then take a bow for moving one wall.
9. The deadline that keeps being deferred
Through January the Commission's "stop the clock" suspension of the aviation emissions scheme remained in force, the climb-down that froze charges on intercontinental flights after the rest of the world refused to comply. Brussels passed a law it could not enforce beyond its own borders, then dressed the retreat as a gesture of goodwill. The clock was stopped because the EU had wound it too far.
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