Eurobloat #0058 • February 2015
February was the month the Union discovered that the cure for every problem is more Union: more energy policy, more capital policy, more investment policy, and a great deal more of your personal data. Greece, meanwhile, learned what solidarity feels like when the bills come due.
Folly of the Month: The ECB pulls the rug from under Greece
On 4 February the Governing Council of the European Central Bank announced that it would no longer accept Greek government bonds as collateral, ten days into a newly elected government it did not care for. The waiver vanished, Greek banks were shunted onto the costlier Emergency Liquidity Assistance drip, and the message to Athens voters was admirably blunt: choose the wrong people and the unelected technocrats will tighten the tap until you reconsider. A central bank that insists it is purely independent and purely technical somehow found the timing to apply maximum pressure precisely when negotiations began. Democracy is a fine thing, the ECB seemed to say, so long as it produces the agreed result.
1. The Eurogroup grants Greece four more months to obey
On 20 February the Eurogroup blessed a four-month extension of the bailout, on condition that Athens post a homework letter by Monday listing every measure it promised to take. The capital that votes is allowed to keep its currency only if it submits its essay to nineteen finance ministers for grading. Sovereignty, but with a marking scheme.
2. The Energy Union arrives to centralise the lights
On 25 February the Commission unveiled its Framework Strategy for a Resilient Energy Union, fifteen action points and a brand new layer of Brussels coordination over electricity, gas and your boiler. The accompanying plan helpfully announces a review of the Energy Labelling Directive, the first step towards applying it uniformly from Brussels without bothering national parliaments. Five dimensions of solidarity, and not one of them is leaving member states to run their own grids.
3. Parliament demands your travel records to keep you safe
On 11 February MEPs passed a counter-terrorism resolution committing themselves to finalise the EU Passenger Name Record scheme by year end, harvesting and storing the flight data of every traveller. After years of resisting a database that logs the law-abiding wholesale, the Parliament discovered that a tragedy was the perfect moment to wave it through. The privacy safeguards, naturally, would be sorted out later.
4. The Commission opens a Capital Markets Union it does not yet have
On 18 February the Commission published a Green Paper on Building a Capital Markets Union, a consultation on a thing that did not exist about barriers it would later identify so it could harmonise them away. The pitch is that capital flows freely once Brussels writes a single rulebook to replace the messy national ones. The cure for too much regulation is, as ever, one more regulation to rule them all.
5. Triton patrols the border while people drown
The Mediterranean death toll in early 2015 soared as the Union ran Operation Triton, a Frontex patrol with roughly a third of the budget of the Italian operation it replaced and a remit that kept it close to shore. The result of grand open-borders rhetoric married to a face-saving operation was neither secure frontiers nor saved lives, but the worst of both. A Union that cannot decide whether it wants borders ended up with the failures of having none.
6. Brussels appoints itself auditor of Belgian tax law
On 3 February the Commission opened an in-depth state aid investigation into Belgium's excess profit ruling system, a tax arrangement written by an elected national government under its own tax code. The Commission, which levies no income tax of its own, decided it would nonetheless decide how much tax Belgium may forgo. Competition policy is a versatile instrument for grading member states on decisions that were never Brussels to make.
7. Parliament builds a special committee to inspect everyone's tax rulings
On 12 February MEPs voted by 612 to 19 to set up the TAXE special committee, armed to rummage through national tax rulings going back to 1991. Twenty-eight capitals had quietly set their own corporate tax bargains, which is precisely the sort of fiscal sovereignty that makes Strasbourg reach for a committee. Six months and forty-five members to establish that other people's tax policy is the Parliament's business.
8. Parliament wants origin labels on the meat in your lasagne
On 11 February MEPs voted 460 to 204 to urge the Commission to make country-of-origin labelling mandatory for the meat hidden inside processed foods, the lasagne and the ready meal alike. Having spent years lecturing the public on the single market and the free flow of goods, the Parliament now wants every sausage to carry a passport. The horsemeat scare is the pretext; the instinct to regulate the back of every packet is the habit.
9. The Juncker plan: conjuring 315 billion from 21 billion
On 17 February the finance ministers endorsed the EIB taking charge of the European Fund for Strategic Investments, the centrepiece of the Juncker plan that promised to summon 315 billion euros of investment from a guarantee a fifteenth that size. The trick is leverage, the assumption is that private money will queue up behind a public backstop, and the accountability if it does not is, as ever, nobody's. A Union that cannot grow its own economy decided the answer was a clever multiplier and a press release.
→ eib.org
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