Eurobloat #0046 • February 2014
A short month, but long enough for the Union to punish a country for voting, mark everyone's corruption homework except its own, and approve fresh rules on cigarette packets and olive farmers' daughters.
Folly of the Month: Switzerland votes for its own borders, so Brussels confiscates the Erasmus card
On 9 February the Swiss voted, narrowly but clearly, to manage their own immigration by quota. A sovereign people deciding who enters their country is roughly the point of having a country at all. Brussels disagreed, and within days the Commission suspended Switzerland from the Horizon 2020 research programme and the Erasmus student exchange, while the Parliament tutted that the Union "cannot accept cherry-picking by Switzerland." The lesson, helpfully demonstrated, was that free movement is not a treaty you may renegotiate but a sacrament you may not question, and that the price of saying no to Brussels is having your students sent home.
1. The corruption report with one chapter mysteriously missing
On 3 February the Commission released its first ever Anti-Corruption Report, solemnly grading all twenty-eight member states and pricing the rot at around 120 billion euro a year, conveniently about the size of the EU's own budget. The expected chapter on corruption inside the EU institutions themselves was simply left out. A schoolmaster who marks every pupil but skips his own exam paper.
2. Plain packets, by order of Brussels
On 26 February the Parliament approved the revised Tobacco Products Directive, dictating the size of health warnings, banning menthol and other flavours, and reaching its regulatory hand into electronic cigarettes that burn nothing at all. Twenty-eight nations, one approved design for a cigarette box.
3. Reaching for everyone's purchase orders
Also on 26 February the Parliament and Council adopted three sweeping public procurement directives, rewriting how every town hall and water board across the continent is permitted to buy a pencil. Modernisation, they called it, which in Brussels means a longer rulebook with the Commission's name on the cover.
4. A vote against the killer robots, just not against the surveillance
On 27 February the Parliament passed a resolution on armed drones, gravely opposing extrajudicial killing by remote control. A fine sentiment, though the same institutions spent the month happily expanding rules that watch, log and grade their own citizens with no resolution at all.
5. One nation's police, now permitted to search another's
On 27 February the Parliament adopted the European Investigation Order, a tidy instrument letting a judicial authority in one member state compel its counterparts in another to gather evidence, tap, trace and hand over whatever is asked. Brussels calls it efficient cross-border cooperation. The plainer description is that your country's investigators may now be set to work by a magistrate you never elected in a capital you have never visited.
6. The tax on trades that will not die
The plan for a financial transaction tax across eleven member states limped on through February, missing its own launch date yet again. An EU-level levy is precisely the sort of thing member states once decided for themselves, which is exactly why Brussels wants it.
7. A fortune in fines, trimmed by five million
On 27 February the General Court upheld the Commission's LCD-screen cartel penalties, generously reducing LG Display's fine from 215 million euro to 210 million. The Court spent its time refereeing the size of a punishment the Commission had already decided, the Union policing markets it does not run with money it did not earn.
8. The common fisheries policy discovers women
On 27 February the Parliament adopted a resolution on "specific actions in the common fisheries policy for developing the role of women." Having spent decades regulating who may catch which fish where, Brussels found a fresh corner of the harbour to legislate about, and produced a report rather than a single extra cod.
9. Banking union, agreed everywhere except where it counts
On 17 February, ahead of the finance ministers' meeting, the Parliament's negotiators set out their terms for the Single Resolution Mechanism, the machinery to wind up failing banks from Brussels rather than from national capitals, insisting the single fund be pooled and equally accessible from the start. The customary language of efficient, predictable, credible decision making, which is to say another lever quietly lifted out of member states' hands.
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