Eurobloat #0039 • July 2013
July 2013 was a busy month for an institution that claims to be running out of money. It found the appetite to acquire a new member state, invent a continental prosecutor, hand itself the keys to every eurozone bank, and pass a tax its own legal service would soon declare unlawful.
Folly of the Month: A prosecutor for the whole continent
On 17 July the Commission proposed a European Public Prosecutor's Office, a single independent body that would investigate and prosecute offences against the Union's budget across member states. The logic was familiar. Brussels manages the money so poorly that fraud is rampant, so the answer is naturally not to manage the money better but to mint a new supranational prosecutor with powers that national prosecutors used to hold. Member states that already have working courts and prosecutors were invited to make room for a Brussels appointee, on the grounds that the people who lost the cash are best placed to chase the thieves.
1. Twenty-eight and counting
On 1 July Croatia became the twenty-eighth member state, the EU's answer to a continent that keeps asking it to do less. A bloc that could not balance its own books or audit its own accounts decided the pressing task was to grow larger, and toasted the expansion as a triumph rather than a liability acquired.
2. Brussels is shocked, shocked, that anyone snoops
On 4 July the Parliament passed a resolution wringing its hands over the American PRISM programme and demanding that EU citizens' data be protected from surveillance. The sermon would land better had the same institution not spent years defending a Data Retention Directive forcing telecoms to store everyone's call and connection records, and had it not been drafting fresh rules to read your messages for your own good.
3. One ring to resolve them all
On 10 July the Commission proposed a Single Resolution Mechanism, a centralised board with a fund and the final say over winding up banks across the eurozone. The decisive power, naturally, was parked with the Commission itself, so that the institution which failed to see the crisis coming would now decide which banks live and which die. Germany doubted the legal basis. The centralisers pressed on regardless.
4. A tax even its lawyers could not love
On 3 July the Parliament voted by 522 to 141 to bless the financial transaction tax for eleven member states, an EU-level levy dressed up as the sector paying its dues. Within weeks the Council's own legal service concluded the scheme exceeded member states' taxing powers, infringed the treaty and discriminated against countries that wanted nothing to do with it. Brussels had voted for a tax before checking whether it was lawful.
5. The cigarette ruler comes out
On 10 July the Parliament's environment committee waved through its line on the Tobacco Products Directive, complete with health warnings smothering three quarters of every packet, a ban on menthol, a minimum cigarette diameter to abolish slim cigarettes and a plan to treat e-cigarettes as medicines available only from pharmacies. Nothing says a serious legislature quite like a continent of officials measuring cigarettes with calipers and deciding the safer alternative should be hardest to buy.
6. Welcome aboard the sinking ship
On 9 July the Council formally cleared Latvia to adopt the euro on 1 January 2014, making it the eighteenth member of a currency union that had just spent three years lurching from bailout to bailout. There is no surer sign of confidence than recruiting a new passenger while the lifeboats are still in the water.
7. A trillion here, a trillion there
On 3 July the Parliament endorsed the negotiated outcome of the 2014 to 2020 long-term budget, a package running close to a thousand billion euros, by 474 votes to 193. The headline was austerity and restraint. The reality was seven more years of structural funds, agricultural cheques and a gravy train that no audit ever quite manages to derail.
8. Keep every record, just in case
On 9 July the Court of Justice heard the challenge to the Data Retention Directive, the rule obliging providers to keep every citizen's phone and internet metadata for up to two years for the police to collect on request. The same week the Parliament was lecturing Washington about spying, its own blanket-retention regime was in the dock, and it would take until 2014 for the Court to throw the thing out as a disproportionate breach of fundamental rights.
9. The watt police arrive
On 8 July the Commission adopted Regulation 666/2013, its ecodesign rules for vacuum cleaners, capping the motor at 1600 watts from September 2014 and a feeble 900 watts from September 2017. A continent that could not resolve its banks or balance its budget found the time to decide how much power your hoover may draw, on the theory that the citizen cannot be trusted with a machine that actually picks up the dirt.
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