Eurobloat #0047 • March 2014
While Russian troops walked into Crimea, Brussels spent March 2014 doing what it does best: building new institutions, drafting new rulebooks, and reassuring everyone that the answer to every problem was a little more Europe.
Folly of the Month: A new central machine to bury your bank
After a sixteen-hour overnight haggle, Parliament and the Council struck their deal on 20 March 2014 for the Single Resolution Mechanism, the second pillar of banking union. The pitch was that taxpayers would never again foot the bill when a bank fell over. The delivery was a labyrinthine new central authority, a Single Resolution Board, and a fund to be filled by the banks themselves, all sitting one rung above your national capital and answerable to almost no one you ever voted for. Decisions on whether to wind up a bank, taken in a weekend in Brussels, are exactly the sort of power that used to belong to sovereign states.
1. A continent-wide rulebook for your personal data
On 12 March 2014 the Parliament backed the draft Data Protection Regulation by 621 votes to 10, the future GDPR, locking the position in before the May elections so the next Parliament could not undo it. A single EU rulebook, threatening firms with fines reckoned as a slice of global turnover, was sold as protecting you while quietly making Brussels the data regulator for the planet.
2. Outraged by spying, the EU votes to keep its own surveillance options open
Also on 12 March the Parliament adopted, by 544 to 78, a thundering resolution on NSA mass surveillance, demanding the suspension of the bank-data deal and the Safe Harbour arrangement with Washington. Stirring stuff, until you remember it was a non-binding resolution from a body with no power to suspend anything, issued weeks before the very same institutions began drafting their own appetite for data retention.
3. Tanks in Crimea, met with a guest list
After Russia seized Crimea, the Council on 17 March 2014 responded with asset freezes and travel bans on a modest list of twenty-one named individuals, having already suspended an EU-Russia summit nobody especially wanted at an emergency gathering earlier in the month. A common foreign policy that had spent years courting Moscow with pipelines and partnership talks discovered, too late, that a club with no borders worth the name also has no clout worth the name.
4. A summit to debate having a debate
EU leaders gathered on 20 and 21 March 2014 and held a first policy debate on a 2030 climate and energy framework, before agreeing that the real decisions would be taken in October. The headline achievement of a European Council summit was to schedule another European Council summit, while reconfirming targets to complete an internal energy market that was already years overdue.
5. The right to a bank account, granted from Brussels
On 20 March 2014 Parliament and the Council struck their deal on the Payment Accounts Directive, handing every citizen a right to a basic bank account regardless of residence or finances. A reasonable enough idea for a member state to legislate, now solemnly decreed from the centre, because apparently nobody in Europe could be trusted to open a current account without a directive to authorise it.
6. A 90-day consultation to calm a row Brussels started
On 27 March 2014 the Commission launched a public consultation on investor-state dispute settlement in the TTIP talks, having first negotiated the controversial clauses and only then asked the public what it thought. The exercise drew some 150,000 replies, most of them hostile, which is what happens when you consult after the fact rather than before.
7. Confiscation, now harmonised across the Union
On 14 March 2014 the Council adopted the directive on freezing and confiscating the proceeds of crime, smoothing the seizure of assets across borders. Catching crooks is fine; the steady migration of criminal-justice powers from national parliaments to an EU directive is the part that should give a free people pause.
8. MEPs reject the Commission for not labelling enough
On 12 March 2014 the Parliament rejected, by 402 votes to 258, a Commission text on labelling nanomaterials in food additives, on the grounds that it failed to label enough of them. When the row in Strasbourg is over how many microscopic particles must be printed on the back of a packet, you know the great questions of the age have been settled.
9. A resolution for Ukraine, and not much else
On 13 March 2014 the Parliament passed a resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine, the standard Strasbourg response to a crisis it could not influence. The words were the right ones; the gap between the EU's grand pronouncements on its neighbourhood and its actual ability to shape events had rarely looked wider.
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