Eurobloat #0042 • October 2013
October was the month the European Union learned that someone had been listening to its telephones. The shock was so profound that leaders gathered in Brussels to demand the right to be left alone, then voted to take charge of everyone else's bank accounts, data and dinner labelling.
Folly of the Month: The summit of wounded feelings
The October European Council, held on 24 and 25 October, was supposed to be about the digital economy. Instead it dissolved into collective indignation when it emerged that the American National Security Agency had been monitoring the mobile telephone of Angela Merkel, who informed the world that spying among friends is never acceptable. Twenty-eight leaders who spend their working lives building databases of their own citizens declared themselves scandalised that anyone might do the same to them, and dispatched Berlin and Paris to extract reassurances from Washington. The lesson that surveillance is intolerable was, you will note, applied strictly to the surveillance of themselves.
1. Parliament votes to stop sharing data, having built the machinery to share it
On 23 October the Parliament voted by 280 to 254 to suspend the agreement handing your bank transfers to the American Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme, outraged that the NSA might have helped itself anyway. The grand gesture was non-binding, since only the Commission can act, so the data kept flowing while everyone felt better about it.
2. The data protection committee that wants to protect the data for itself
On 21 October the Parliament's civil liberties committee adopted its version of the General Data Protection Regulation, en bloc, in under an hour of an evening sitting in Strasbourg. A continent-spanning rulebook on every byte you generate, waved through faster than most committees order coffee, and sold as a triumph for your privacy.
3. Brussels seizes the banks
On 15 October the Council signed off the Single Supervisory Mechanism, and on 29 October the texts were published, handing the European Central Bank command of euro-area banking supervision. National regulators were quietly demoted to branch offices, and this transfer of power from capitals to Frankfurt was christened, as ever, a step towards more Europe.
4. Simplification, brought to you by the people who made it complicated
On 2 October the Commission unveiled REFIT, a programme of 133 actions to cut red tape, repeal redundant laws and make regulation lighter. Barroso toured the summit praising common-sense regulation, which raised the question of who had spent the previous decades manufacturing the nonsense now requiring 133 separate rescues. Nobody was held to account, naturally, and most of the promised repeals were pencilled in for some later year.
5. Hundreds drown off Lampedusa, and Parliament passes a resolution
On 3 October a boat carrying around 500 people sank off Lampedusa. The Parliament responded on 23 October with a resolution welcoming a new Mediterranean task force, the EU's preferred memorial: a committee. Its open-borders incoherence, which lures people onto unseaworthy vessels and then mourns them, remained entirely intact.
6. The cigarette packet must now lecture you
On 8 October MEPs backed the Tobacco Products Directive, mandating health warnings across 65 per cent of every packet, banning packs of fewer than 20 and outlawing characterising flavours across 28 nations at once. The one mercy was that members rejected the Commission's plan to regulate e-cigarettes as medicines, proving the EU can occasionally be talked out of its worst ideas, though only after proposing them.
7. A trade deal, agreed in principle, to take effect in principle
On 18 October Barroso and Stephen Harper shook hands on an agreement in principle for a Canada-EU trade deal, hailed as historic. The handshake was the easy part: drafting, fine-tuning and ratification stretched on for years afterward, a reminder that an EU of 28 vetoes turns even free trade into a decade-long negotiation.
→ cbc.ca
8. From 28 October, your fruit juice is officially educated
The deadline of 28 October arrived for Directive 2012/12, harmonising the labelling and reserved names of fruit juices across the Union. Somewhere in Brussels, a working group had decided that the citizens of 28 nations could not be trusted to understand orange juice without a continent-wide rulebook to guide them.
9. A prize for conscience, awarded by the institution
On 10 October the Parliament announced Malala Yousafzai as winner of its Sakharov Prize, a genuinely brave young woman annexed to the EU's favourite hobby of handing out medals and sermons. The recipient was beyond reproach; the spectacle of an institution awarding itself a share of her courage was the usual Brussels vanity.
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