Eurobloat #0071 • March 2016
March 2016 was the month the Union outsourced its borders to Ankara, spent a fortune doing it, and then went back to fretting about gas hobs and prospectuses. A vintage month: the open-borders project quietly admitting it could not manage its own openness.
Folly of the Month: Six billion euros for Ankara to mind the gate
On 18 March the European Council and Turkey announced their statement: every irregular migrant crossing to the Greek islands would be returned to Turkey, and for each Syrian sent back another would be resettled from Turkey into the EU. The price was up to six billion euros, accelerated visa liberalisation, and renewed talk of Turkish accession. So the Union that had spent a year lecturing member states about solidarity and the moral duty of open doors discovered that the only way to stop the chaos was to pay President Erdogan to hold the gate shut. Stopping the flow was the sensible part. Doing it by handing billions and visa-free travel to a government with a deteriorating record on press freedom, and pretending a "statement" was not a treaty so as to dodge parliamentary scrutiny, was pure Brussels.
1. Parliament finally tells the tobacco lobby to clear off
On 9 March MEPs voted by 414 to 214 to ask the Commission not to renew its anti-smuggling deal with Philip Morris International when it expired in July. A rare outbreak of sense, slightly undercut by the fact that the Commission had been cosy enough with a tobacco giant to need telling.
2. The Commission is shocked that shops set their own prices
On 18 March the competition directorate published the first findings of its e-commerce sector inquiry and announced, gravely, that geo-blocking was "widespread", with 38 percent of retailers and 68 percent of content providers treating customers differently by country. A continent of separate markets, languages, taxes and rights treats its customers differently by country. Hold the front page.
3. Your tax return, now shared continent-wide
On 8 March member states agreed that tax authorities would automatically swap country-by-country reports on multinationals, the next slab of the anti-tax-avoidance package. Billed as catching the big fish, it is mostly another pipe pumping national data into the Brussels machine, with the harmonisation of tax always one report closer.
4. Eleven parliaments say no, and Brussels says yes anyway
On 8 March the Commission proposed rewriting the Posting of Workers Directive around the slogan "equal pay for equal work at the same place", a tidy way of pricing eastern firms out of western markets. Eleven national parliaments, from Poland to Denmark, filed reasoned objections and triggered the rare "yellow card" for breaching subsidiarity. On 20 June the Commission looked at this revolt of the member states, decided it knew better, and kept the proposal exactly as it was.
5. Regulation 2016/426: the great gas-appliance emergency
On 9 March the Parliament and Council adopted Regulation (EU) 2016/426 on appliances burning gaseous fuels, repealing the 2009 directive that had governed your hob and boiler perfectly adequately. Somewhere a citizen lay awake worrying that grills across twenty-eight countries were not yet harmonised. Brussels heard that citizen.
6. One animal health law to rule them all
March also delivered Regulation (EU) 2016/429, the new Animal Health Law, adopted on 9 March to pull the rules on every beast in the Union into a single centralised code. Hundreds of pages so that a sick chicken in one member state can be governed by exactly the same article as a sick chicken in another. Subsidiarity, mourned by all, attended by none.
7. A Global Strategy, because the migration one went so well
On 16 March High Representative Mogherini presented her progress on a forthcoming "Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy", calling for an "upgrade" of common European instruments because national policies "were not working". The body that had just paid Turkey to run its border concluded that the answer to its failures was, inevitably, more Europe.
8. Privacy Shield: the lawyers are not convinced
On 17 March the Parliament's civil liberties committee held a hearing on the draft EU-US Privacy Shield, the hasty replacement for the Safe Harbour deal struck down by the Court. The chair of the EU data protection authorities, Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, was warning at the same time that bulk collection was the key issue and that the deal still left the door open to collection that was "massive and indiscriminate". A surveillance fix that does not fix the surveillance: the rare overreach Brussels could not simply wave through.
9. Steel, China and the fifteen-year fudge
On 16 March the Commission published a communication on saving the steel industry, conceding that Chinese overcapacity alone ran to some 350 million tonnes, almost double the Union's entire annual output, while cheap imports battered European mills. Yet on the central question, whether to grant Beijing "market economy status" and blunt its own anti-dumping tools, the Union prepared to spend the rest of the year agonising rather than simply protecting its industry. The single trade policy that was meant to give Europe clout produced mainly a communication and more delay.
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