Eurobloat #0041 • September 2013
September brought a farewell sermon, a fresh empire of bank supervision, and a legal opinion the Commission decided to ignore. A productive month, by the standards of an institution that measures progress in column inches of new rules.
Folly of the Month: A single telecoms market, sold as deregulation
On 11 September the Commission unveiled "Connected Continent", which it billed without embarrassment as its most ambitious plan in twenty-six years. The pitch was liberation: no more roaming charges, less red tape, a borderless market. The reality was a fresh tier of Brussels rules governing spectrum, net neutrality and consumer contracts across twenty-eight countries, on the theory that the cure for fragmented regulation is more regulation written one storey higher. Twenty-six years of building the maze, and the proudest moment is a promise to install signposts.
1. Barroso delivers a State of the Union nobody elected him to give
On 11 September José Manuel Barroso gave his final State of the Union address in Strasbourg, an annual ritual borrowed from a country with an actual president. The remedy he prescribed for a crisis that had become, in his words, a social crisis with dramatic consequences for citizens, was, as ever, more Europe.
2. The ECB is handed a continent of banks to mind
On 12 September Parliament approved the Single Supervisory Mechanism, transferring oversight of the eurozone's largest banks from national regulators to the European Central Bank. Around 130 of the biggest banks were quietly removed from the supervision of the capitals that charter them, on the comforting principle that the people closest to a problem are the least qualified to watch it.
3. Brussels is told its favourite tax is illegal, and presses on regardless
On 6 September the Council's own legal service concluded that the proposed financial transaction tax exceeded member states' jurisdiction, breached the treaties and was discriminatory against the countries that had declined to join. The Commission, undaunted by the inconvenience of its own lawyers, announced it would proceed anyway. When the law says no to a new EU-level tax, the law is simply outvoted.
4. Parliament opens a grand inquiry into spying it cannot stop
On 5 September the Civil Liberties Committee held the first hearing of its inquiry into NSA mass surveillance, summoning witnesses to express deep concern and demand that the Safe Harbour data deal be suspended. Stirring stuff, though the surveillance was American, the powers to halt it sat in member-state capitals, and the chief output was a series of hearings followed by a strongly worded report.
5. Biofuels get a 6 percent cap, to patch the mandate Brussels wrote
On 11 September MEPs voted to cap food-crop biofuels at 6 percent of transport fuel, a belated attempt to undo the very mandate the EU had imposed to make us burn crops in the first place. Having spent years subsidising the diversion of food into fuel tanks and watching food prices climb, Brussels now congratulated itself for half-correcting its own scheme.
6. The crusade against menthol stalls in the corridors
The plenary vote on the Tobacco Products Directive, with its ban on menthol and its plan to treat e-cigarettes as medicines, was pencilled in for 10 September and then shoved into October amid frantic manoeuvring. A directive to save adults from their own choices, delayed by the lobbying chaos that nanny legislation reliably summons.
7. The fracking vote is postponed so everyone can talk about it more
The vote to force environmental impact assessments onto shale gas projects was also bumped from September into October, MEPs deciding they needed yet another plenary debate before they could agree on a fresh layer of paperwork for energy that Europe badly lacks. A continent short of cheap power, taking its time to make the drilling harder.
8. Mortgages get the EU-wide harmonisation treatment
On 10 September Parliament backed the Mortgage Credit Directive, an EU-wide rulebook for home loans, then postponed the final vote pending one more wrangle with the Council over enforcement. Twenty-eight housing markets, twenty-eight legal traditions, one Brussels template, because nothing says local knowledge like a directive written for everybody at once.
9. Online gambling is judged too important to leave to nations
On 10 September Parliament adopted a resolution on online gambling in the internal market, urging the Commission and member states to coordinate their rules, warn the young about addiction and pursue a more joined-up European approach to people placing bets on their own phones. A field that the treaties leave squarely to the member states, and Brussels could not resist drafting a wish-list for it anyway, on the timeless principle that anything happening in twenty-eight countries must really be one European problem.
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