Eurobloat #0069 • January 2016
January opened with the Commission reaching for its red pen to grade an elected government, the tax planners drafting a Union-wide levy, and the much-praised Schengen zone quietly sprouting passport checks. A productive new year for those who believe the answer to every problem is more Europe.
Folly of the Month: Brussels appoints itself headmaster of Poland
On 13 January the Commission launched its brand new Rule of Law Framework against Poland, summoning a member state to explain its domestic constitutional arrangements as though Warsaw were a pupil sent to the head's office. The dispute concerned how Poland staffed its own Constitutional Tribunal and its own public broadcaster, matters one might naively assume were for Poles and their parliament to settle. The Commission, having invented the procedure precisely so it could use it, now had a fresh instrument for scolding capitals that vote the wrong way. Nothing was resolved; the lectures simply continued for the rest of the year.
1. A new Europe-wide corporate tax, branded as fairness
On 28 January the Commission unveiled its Anti Tax Avoidance Package, six new harmonised rules on interest, exit taxes and the rest, all sold as cracking down on the wicked multinational. The quiet achievement was to move yet another lever of tax policy from national capitals to Brussels under cover of a moral panic.
2. The Commission overrules Belgium on Belgium's own taxes
On 11 January the Commission declared Belgium's excess profit tax scheme illegal state aid and ordered around 700 million euros clawed back from 35 companies. A sovereign country had decided how to tax firms operating on its soil, and Brussels decided that this was Brussels' decision to make.
→ lexgo.be
3. Vestager circles a British tax deal
On 28 January the Commission confirmed it would examine Google's 130 million pound settlement with the British taxman, after opposition politicians wrote in to complain. A deal struck between a company and Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs was now to be reviewed by a competition commissioner in another country, on the theory that almost any tax arrangement might be reframed as forbidden aid.
4. Schengen rediscovers the passport
On 4 January Sweden began checking the documents of every traveller crossing from Denmark, prompting Copenhagen to slap controls on its German frontier within hours. The crowning achievement of European integration, the borderless zone, was reduced to commuters queuing on the Oresund Bridge, and the people who built the open door spent the month blaming everyone but themselves.
5. Doubling the diesel limit, then calling it clean air
Having built an emissions regime around laboratory tests that bore no relation to the road, Brussels spent January persuading MEPs not to veto a plan that lets new diesels emit more than double the agreed nitrogen oxide limit. The Parliament obliged on 3 February after the Commission promised a review one day. The fiction was patched, the limit was relaxed, and nobody who designed the original fairy tale was held to account.
6. A border force that can be sent in over your head
January saw the Commission press ahead with its European Border and Coast Guard, the proposal under which the agency could deploy to a member state's frontier even where that state objected. Protecting the external border was loudly described as a national prerogative, right up until the clause allowing Brussels to substitute itself for the nation.
7. Cameron's grand renegotiation inches nowhere
On 31 January David Cameron and Donald Tusk talked into the night and agreed only to keep talking, the long-trailed British settlement still unwritten. The thinness of what a member state could extract by asking nicely was an education in itself, and in due course the British drew the obvious lesson at the ballot box.
→ gov.uk
8. Cash for Ankara, conscience optional
Throughout January the EU leaned ever harder on its three billion euro arrangement with Turkey, paying President Erdogan to hold migrants on the far side of the Aegean. Having mismanaged its own borders, Brussels resolved to outsource the job to a government it would lecture about democracy on any other week.
9. A fresh directive for anyone who sells insurance
On 20 January the Insurance Distribution Directive was adopted, a new layer of Union rules for everyone designing or selling a policy, all in the name of the consumer. Another harmonised burden arrives, and somewhere a compliance department expands to greet it.
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