Eurobloat #0037 • May 2013
With a continent on fire with youth unemployment and a banking crisis still smouldering, the European Commission spent May 2013 on the matters that truly count: how oil reaches your bread, how loudly your vacuum cleaner is permitted to hum, and how best to mark the homework of grown-up nation states.
Folly of the Month: The Great Olive Oil Jug Ban
In May, news broke that from January 2014 the Commission would forbid restaurants from serving olive oil in the humble refillable jug or dipping bowl, requiring instead pre-packaged, tamper-proof, factory-labelled bottles. Fifteen of twenty-seven governments waved it through, with Britain abstaining, because nothing says single market like dictating the vessel from which a Spaniard may pour his own oil. The backlash was so loud that within days Brussels was hunting for a face-saving retreat, eventually discovering that bowls with a pinch of salt or herb were somehow exempt. A trillion euros lost to tax evasion, and the finest minds of the Commission were busy regulating the cruet.
1. Your vacuum cleaner is too powerful
On 3 May the Commission adopted Delegated Regulation 665/2013, slapping energy labels on vacuum cleaners, with a companion ecodesign rule due to cap motors at 900 watts from 2017. Brussels had decided that the citizen could not be trusted to choose how vigorously to clean his own carpet. The energy label was later annulled by the courts, so that burden was invented, imposed and then quietly undone, with nobody held to account.
2. The EU draws up your country's report card
On 29 May the Commission issued its country-specific recommendations, instructing each member state on how to run its economy, budget and labour market. The European Semester casts Brussels as the schoolmaster and sovereign parliaments as pupils awaiting a grade. The recommendations were, of course, non-binding, right up until the moment they were not.
3. The summit that recovered nothing but momentum
Leaders gathered on 22 May for a special summit on tax evasion, hailed fresh political momentum, and agreed almost nothing concrete to recover the trillion euros they say goes missing each year. The headline ask was to finally adopt a savings directive whose revision had been stuck in the EU machine since 2008. Five years to share some bank data, and they called it progress.
4. Brussels takes aim at Google
Through May the Commission ran its market test on the commitments offered by Google to settle the search antitrust case, inviting complainants and rivals to pick the concessions apart. The feedback was overwhelmingly hostile, which is what happens when a regulator outsources the judging of a company to that company's competitors. It would take years, several rejected offers and a great deal of lawyering before Brussels admitted the whole exercise had failed.
5. The data protection vote that drowned in amendments
The Parliament's civil liberties committee had hoped to settle its position on the new data protection regulation on 29 May, then gave up, buried under more than three thousand amendments and pushed the vote into the autumn. Many of those amendments were lifted, word for word, from lobbyists' briefing papers. A law sold as protecting the citizen was being drafted by copy and paste.
6. A blessing for the world's first regional transaction tax
On 23 May the European Economic and Social Committee adopted an opinion warmly welcoming the proposed financial transaction tax for eleven member states, calling it an exceptional opportunity that might one day go global. An EU advisory body cheering an EU-level levy on financial trades is the gravy train applauding its own buffet. Britain had already gone to court to stop it.
7. The court rules on who must take the asylum seeker
On 30 May the Court of Justice handed down its judgment in Halaf (C-528/11), interpreting the Dublin rules on which member state must examine an asylum claim. The ruling tightened the lattice of obligations binding national authorities to the EU's common asylum system. Member states learned, once again, that the final word on their borders is spoken in Luxembourg.
8. New machinery for consumer complaints
On 21 May the Parliament and Council adopted Directive 2013/11 on alternative dispute resolution, building a fresh layer of cross-border redress bodies across the Union. Every harmonised scheme arrives dressed as convenience for the consumer and leaves behind another quango to be funded and staffed. Simplification, Brussels style, means one more institution than you had before.
9. A billion-euro answer to a crisis Brussels deepened
As youth unemployment touched a record 24.4 per cent, the EU pressed ahead with its Youth Guarantee and Youth Employment Initiative, promising offers of work or training and a fund to match. A continent whose single currency and rigid rules helped strand a generation now proposed to spend its way out, scheme upon scheme, while the underlying machine went untouched.
→ employment-social-affairs.ec.europa.eu
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