Eurobloat #0035 • March 2013
March 2013 was the month the single currency stopped pretending. To save a small island, the men of the Eurogroup decided that the savings of ordinary people were theirs to take, and then expressed surprise that anyone minded.
Folly of the Month: Brussels raids the piggy bank in Cyprus
On 16 March the Eurogroup, the Commission and the European Central Bank announced a rescue for Cyprus whose centrepiece was a one-off levy on bank deposits, including the small, insured savings of ordinary people. The Cypriot parliament threw it out, the banks were shut for nearly a fortnight, and a second deal on 25 March simply wound up Laiki Bank and seized close to half of the larger uninsured deposits instead. The lesson taught to every saver on the continent was unmistakable. When the currency union runs short, the money in your account is not entirely yours, and the people who decided this answer to no electorate at all.
1. The eurozone hands its national budgets in to be marked
On 12 March Parliament approved the "two-pack", granting the Commission the power to inspect, comment on and demand changes to the draft budgets of eurozone member states before their own elected parliaments have voted on them. Brussels now grades the homework of sovereign nations, which is precisely the arrangement everyone was promised would never happen.
2. MEPs reject the budget for being too small
On 13 March, by 506 votes to 161, the Parliament rejected the seven-year budget that the member states had laboriously agreed in February, because the first ever real-terms cut to EU spending was not to its liking. The capitals had finally trimmed the gravy train by a fraction, and the institution that lives off it was appalled.
3. Microsoft fined 561 million euros over a missing menu
On 6 March the Commission fined Microsoft 561 million euros because a "choice screen" offering rival web browsers had quietly vanished from a Windows update for some months. Half a billion euros for a forgotten drop-down menu that any user could route around in seconds, which tells you rather more about Brussels than about Redmond.
4. The cap on bankers' bonuses
In early March the Council and Parliament settled the deal capping bankers' bonuses at one year's salary, or two with shareholder approval, folded into the CRD IV package. The predictable result, foreseen by everyone except the people drafting it, was that base salaries simply rose to fill the gap, leaving banks less able to claw pay back when things went wrong.
5. The cosmetics testing ban that polices the whole planet
From 11 March it became unlawful to sell in the EU any cosmetic ingredient tested on animals anywhere in the world, regardless of when or whether a non-animal alternative existed. Brussels did not merely set rules for its own market, it appointed itself the conscience of every laboratory on earth, which is the EU's favourite trick dressed up as compassion.
→ single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu
6. The Common Agricultural Policy reform that reforms nothing
On 13 March MEPs voted through their position on the latest reshuffle of the Common Agricultural Policy, which still swallows close to two-fifths of the entire EU budget. After all the talk of greening and modernising, the money continues to flow to landowners by the acre, and the great farm subsidy machine grinds on much as before.
7. The summit that prescribed more of the same medicine
At the European Council of 14 and 15 March the leaders surveyed a continent sliding deeper into recession and resolved to apply the "six-pack", the "two-pack" and the fiscal compact "to the full". Faced with the wreckage of austerity, the cure proposed was a larger dose of the rulebooks that helped cause it.
8. A new tobacco directive to standardise your packet
The Commission's proposed Tobacco Products Directive worked its way through committee in March, complete with giant warnings, plans to ban menthol and ambitions to dictate the design of every packet on the shelf. Whatever one thinks of smoking, the spectacle of Brussels reaching for the typeface and colour of a cigarette box is the nanny state in its purest form.
9. The bank supervisor that answers to nobody you elected
On 19 March negotiators struck the deal handing the European Central Bank direct supervision of the eurozone's banks, some 150 of the largest, those holding more than 30 billion euros in assets or worth a fifth of their home country's output. Having watched Brussels reach into savers' accounts in Cyprus, the response was to move yet more power away from national capitals and into an unelected central bank in Frankfurt, which is the federal reflex laid bare.
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