Eurobloat #0072 • April 2016
April was the month the Union discovered that the answer to terrorism, tax, weeds and your shopping habits was, in every case, more Europe. It also began posting migrants back to Turkey, having spent two years insisting that borders were a moral failing.
Folly of the Month: A continent gets one rulebook for everyone's data
On 14 April the Parliament gave final approval to the General Data Protection Regulation, a single 88-page rulebook reaching into every business, charity and parish newsletter from Lisbon to Tallinn. We are told it protects you. What it actually does is hand Brussels a continent-wide regime, complete with fines of up to four per cent of global turnover, that no national parliament gets to amend. The same institution that cannot agree where to put its own seat now decides how a corner shop in Cornwall stores an email address, and it will spend the next two years telling everyone to prepare for the privilege.
1. Brussels picks a fight with Google's phone
On 20 April the Commission fired a Statement of Objections at Google over Android, cross that manufacturers were offered a free operating system on terms they were free to refuse and mostly chose to accept. Competition officials who could not build a search engine if their pensions depended on it now propose to redesign one, and the bill for getting it wrong will land on the people who actually use the product.
2. Every passenger, filed
On 14 April MEPs waved through the Passenger Name Record directive, obliging airlines to hand over the travel details of everyone who flies, the guilty and the innocent alike. After years of insisting such bulk collection was an outrage when national governments did it, Parliament discovered it was perfectly civilised once Brussels held the database.
3. The Turkey deal sends its first boats back
On 4 April the first deportees, mostly Pakistanis, were shipped from Lesbos and Chios back to Turkey, the opening instalment of a bargain that buys President Erdogan six billion euros, visa-free travel and warm words about accession. The Union spent two years calling border control heartless, then paid an unsavoury government to do it offshore where the cameras were thinner.
4. A new form for the multinationals to fill in
On 12 April the Commission proposed that large multinationals publish a public, country-by-country tax report, a fresh layer of pan-European disclosure dressed up as transparency. The genuinely curious might ask why the Union, which lets companies shop between twenty-eight tax codes it designed, now needs a Brussels-mandated spreadsheet to find the gap it built itself.
5. The schoolmaster grades Warsaw
On 13 April the Parliament passed a resolution, by 513 to 142, declaring itself gravely worried about the rule of law in Poland and the state of its Constitutional Tribunal. A chamber that cannot run its own accounts without the auditors fainting now sets itself up as headmaster, red pen poised over a member state's constitution.
6. One definition of a secret to rule them all
Also on 14 April, MEPs adopted the Trade Secrets directive, harmonising into a single EU-wide text something twenty-eight legal systems had managed perfectly well to define for themselves. Harmonisation, as ever, means the rule now comes from one place and the room for a member state to disagree quietly disappears.
7. A holistic approach to a border it will not defend
On 12 April Parliament called for a holistic EU approach to Mediterranean migration, which in Brussels dialect means more relocation quotas, more shared asylum machinery and less say for the capitals expected to house the result. The same week boats were sailing the other way under the Turkey deal, which rather suggests the holistic vision and the actual policy were not on speaking terms.
8. Brussels takes a view on weedkiller
On 13 April MEPs voted to second-guess the science on glyphosate, demanding its licence be cut from fifteen years to seven and restricted to professionals only. Having no farm, no laboratory and no liability, the chamber nonetheless felt qualified to retune the spray schedule of every wheat field on the continent.
9. Smart borders, dumber privacy
On 6 April the Commission unveiled its Entry/Exit System, a Schengen-wide plan to take four fingerprints and a facial image from every non-EU traveller and store them centrally. So the Union that spent the month lecturing everyone else about protecting personal data celebrated by proposing to fingerprint visitors at the airport and keep the file.
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