Eurobloat #0078 • October 2016
A month in which the Union discovered that a parliament in Namur could stop the whole machine, and responded by reaching for more power everywhere else.
Folly of the Month: One Belgian region freezes a transatlantic treaty
Seven years of negotiation, a Canadian prime minister booked into Brussels, and the entire apparatus of EU trade policy was halted by the regional parliament of Wallonia, population roughly three and a half million. Belgium's constitution requires all five of its regional governments to consent before the federal government may sign, so when Paul Magnette said no, the Trade Council of 18 October could not adopt the decision and the EU-Canada summit had to be cancelled. The Commission spent years assuring everyone that trade was an exclusive EU competence, then watched a sub-national assembly smaller than Berlin run the timetable. If you wanted a single image of how a Union of this design actually makes decisions, here it is.
→ piie.com
1. The Commission relaunches its plan to tax companies itself
On 25 October the Commission re-tabled the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base, a scheme to harmonise how corporate profits are calculated and carved up across member states, mandatory for the largest groups and sold, as ever, as simplification. Tax is supposed to be the one thing national parliaments still control, which is presumably why Brussels keeps trying to move it upstairs.
→ taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu
2. A treaty ratified before the members had ratified it
On 4 October the Council adopted EU ratification of the Paris Agreement, fast-tracked so that the Union could cross the threshold before its own member states had each completed their national procedures. The point was to get the EU's name on the depositary's list ahead of the cameras in Marrakech, sovereign formalities being a detail to tidy up later.
3. Free train tickets to manufacture a sense of belonging
On 4 October MEPs debated handing every European a free Interrail pass on their eighteenth birthday, the better to instil a "sense of belonging" to the continent. The estimated bill ran to around 1.5 billion euros a year, which is a great deal of money to spend persuading young people to feel something the institutions cannot otherwise inspire.
4. Your IP address is now everyone's business
On 19 October the Court of Justice ruled in the Breyer case that a dynamic IP address can be personal data, even where the website operator cannot identify you, because someone else theoretically could. A neat expansion of data law that hands the Union's regulators a longer reach over every server log on the continent.
5. Brussels lectures Warsaw on a bill Warsaw was already dropping
On 5 October MEPs held a debate condemning a Polish abortion proposal, warning of a return to "medieval times". The Polish parliament voted the bill down the very next day, having reached that conclusion without instruction from Strasbourg, which nonetheless enjoys few things more than grading the homework of national legislatures.
6. A new federal-flavoured border force, just in time
On 6 October the European Border and Coast Guard Agency was launched with a ceremony at the Bulgarian-Turkish frontier, less than a year after it was proposed. After a migration crisis the Union had spent years failing to manage, the response was a bigger Brussels agency rather than any admission that the open-borders design was the problem.
7. The grubby Afghan returns deal
In October the EU signed the "Joint Way Forward" arrangement with Afghanistan, smoothing the return of rejected asylum seekers in exchange for the usual development sweeteners. Having lost control of who arrived, Brussels found itself quietly bargaining with Kabul over who leaves, the sort of deal the Union prefers to announce without a photograph.
→ ecre.org
8. The roaming "fair use" cap nobody asked for returns
Having published a roaming "fair use" plan in September that would have capped free roaming at 90 days a year, then yanked it within days amid ridicule, the Commission spent October patching the wreckage as the Industry Committee picked over the draft on the 12th. Free roaming had been promised; the small print arrived to take a chunk of it back.
9. The order to write rules taxing third countries by name
The same 25 October tax package included a directive instructing the closing of "hybrid mismatches" involving non-EU countries, extending the Anti-Tax Avoidance machinery beyond the Union's own borders. Brussels first builds twenty-eight different tax systems into a single market, then issues directives to manage the seams it created, while never quite saying who is accountable for the complexity.
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