Eurobloat #0060 • April 2015
April was the month the European Union decided your real problem was carrier bags, that the people drowning off Libya could wait for a committee, and that the appropriate response to a humanitarian catastrophe was a plan to blow up the boats afterwards. Forty bags per citizen by the end of 2025, since you ask.
Folly of the Month: The Union counts your shopping bags
On 28 April the Parliament voted through Directive 2015/720, a law whose grand purpose is to ensure that the average European uses no more than ninety lightweight plastic carrier bags a year by the end of 2019, and no more than forty by the end of 2025. Twenty-eight governments, a Commission, a Parliament and several years of trilogue were marshalled to arrive at a number you could fit on a Post-it note. The continent that cannot agree on its own borders or its own currency has settled, with great solemnity, on the precise quantity of plastic you may be handed at a till. Brussels could not police the Mediterranean this month, but it found the time and the legal certainty to police your trip to the greengrocer.
1. The Commission charges Google
On 15 April the Commission sent Google a formal Statement of Objections, accusing it of favouring its own shopping results, the opening shot in a campaign to regulate a search engine nobody is forced to use. Europe could not build a Google of its own, so it decided to litigate one instead.
2. And opens a second front on Android
The same day, Vestager launched an in-depth investigation into Android, the free operating system that runs most of the world's phones, on suspicion that giving software away is a form of abuse. Brussels has discovered a market failure in the act of charging nothing.
3. Brussels picks a fight with Gazprom
On 22 April the Commission served a Statement of Objections on Gazprom over its grip on Central and Eastern European gas markets, having spent years cheerfully wiring the same continent into Russian pipelines in the first place. Energy dependence built by the EU, now to be unpicked by the EU, with no one held to account for either.
4. A thousand drown while the summit is scheduled
After as many as 800 people drowned off Libya on 18 April, EU leaders held a five-hour emergency summit on 23 April and agreed to triple the budget of Operation Triton to one hundred and twenty million euros. The open-borders project that had encouraged the crossings responded to mass death by topping up a patrol mission still smaller than the Italian one it had let lapse.
5. Ten points, none of them a border
On 20 April foreign and interior ministers unveiled a Ten Point Action Plan on migration, a document heavy on agencies, fingerprinting and a voluntary pilot resettlement scheme. A crisis caused by a failure to control the frontier was met with ten points, most of which involved spreading the consequences around the member states rather than ending the cause.
6. The plan to bomb the boats
High Representative Mogherini began lobbying for a UN mandate to let the EU operate in Libyan waters and on Libyan territory to destroy smugglers' vessels, a war on dinghies dressed up as compassion. Having no functioning Libyan state to ask, Brussels decided to go over its head at the Security Council instead.
7. A black box in every new car
On 28 April MEPs approved eCall, mandating that from 2018 every new model of car carry a system permanently connected to the mobile network and able to report its precise location. Sold as road safety, it is a tracking device the Union has decided you must buy, fitted as standard, switched on for life.
8. The Parliament lectures Turkey on 1915
On 15 April the Parliament passed a resolution instructing Turkey to recognise the Armenian genocide of a century earlier, a stirring exercise in moral grandeur over events no sitting MEP witnessed. Ankara replied that the chamber had exceeded its jurisdiction, which, for once, is hard to dispute.
9. Riga ends in recriminations
The Eurogroup met in Riga on 24 April and Greece's talks collapsed, with ministers reportedly branding their Greek counterpart a time-waster and an amateur. Five years and several bailouts into the saga, the Union's great answer to a debt crisis remained another inconclusive meeting and a fresh round of leaks.
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