Eurobloat #0082 • February 2017
The shortest month, and still the Parliament found time to grant rights to machines, sketch out a treasury it has no treaty to build, and grade twenty-seven governments like a deputy head with a clipboard. February 2017: a festival of ambition entirely unmatched by competence.
Folly of the Month: Robots shall be persons, and there shall be an agency
On 16 February the European Parliament voted, by 396 to 123, to ask the Commission to consider granting "electronic personhood" to the most sophisticated autonomous robots, so that a machine could one day bear liability for the damage it causes. The same resolution called for a brand new European Agency for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, because no problem in Brussels is ever so small that it cannot justify a fresh building, a fresh director and a fresh budget line. A continent that cannot agree on who guards its external border had decided the urgent question was the legal status of a robot. The lawyers were delighted. The robots, as yet, had no comment.
1. An EU finance minister, fresh from the Verhofstadt imagination
Also on 16 February, MEPs adopted Guy Verhofstadt's blueprint for the future of Europe, which proposed an EU finance minister and handed the Commission the job of running a "common economic policy" backed by a euro-area budget. The vote scraped through, 283 to 269 with 83 abstentions, which is to say a hair's breadth of the chamber wished to relocate fiscal sovereignty to Brussels, and very nearly as many did not.
2. A treasury for a currency, financed by everyone else
Not to be outdone, a second resolution the same day called for a dedicated "budgetary capacity" for the euro area, a polite name for a common pot funded by member states and disbursed by the centre under conditions the centre would set. The logic never changes: the money flows up, the rules flow down, and the word for it is always "convergence".
3. Fewer commissioners, one seat, and other promises nobody will keep
The Brok and Bresso report, also waved through on 16 February, proposed cutting the size of the Commission and gave a respectful nod to the heretical idea of a single seat for the Parliament. A noble thought. The travelling circus to Strasbourg, costing well over a hundred million euros a year, will of course continue, because the one cut the Parliament can actually make is the one it never will.
4. The schoolmaster delivers the reports
On 22 February the Commission published twenty-seven Country Reports, one for every member state save Greece, grading each capital on its homework and flagging which economies suffered "excessive imbalances". National governments are elected to manage their own economies. Brussels, elected by no one to do so, prefers to mark them out of ten and call it the European Semester.
5. The Malta Declaration: pay Libya, look away
At the Malta summit on 3 February, EU leaders endorsed a plan to stop the central Mediterranean route by training and funding the Libyan coastguard and backing Italy's memorandum with the authorities in Tripoli. Stemming the boats is sensible. Outsourcing the job to militias in a collapsed state, then declaring the conscience clear, is the open-borders project quietly discovering that its principles are negotiable for the right partner.
6. CETA passes, and the street is invited to leave
On 15 February the Parliament ratified the EU-Canada trade deal, CETA, by 408 to 254. The investment court mechanism that so alarmed the protesters survived intact, a reminder that the EU is briskly enthusiastic about supranational courts when they sit above national ones, and only doubtful about sovereignty when somebody proposes to take it back.
7. The carbon market gets another reform
Also on 15 February, MEPs voted to tighten the Emissions Trading System for the period after 2021, strengthening the "Market Stability Reserve" to mop up the glut of permits the scheme itself had created. A market designed by committee, oversupplied by committee, and now rescued by committee. The third attempt is always the charm.
8. Roaming: the EU graciously stops charging for the cage it built
On 8 February member states' ambassadors signed off the wholesale price caps that were the last hurdle before "roam like at home" arrived in June. Cheaper roaming is welcome. It is worth recalling that the charges being abolished existed only because the EU's own single market never quite delivered the single anything, and the cure is always more regulation to undo the last lot.
9. Netflix portability, by order of Brussels
On 7 February the institutions reached a trilogue deal on the "portability" regulation, obliging streaming services to let subscribers watch their films when temporarily abroad in the bloc. A genuine convenience, arranged in the usual manner: not by the market noticing demand, but by the Commission decreeing that the market shall now provide it, with a regulation number to follow.
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