Eurobloat #0084 • April 2017
April was the month the Union discovered it had feelings. It proclaimed twenty brand-new social rights, ordered member states to legislate on nappies and grandparents, and found time between the sermons to draw battle lines around the one country sensible enough to leave.
Folly of the Month: Twenty new "rights" nobody asked Brussels to invent
On 26 April the Commission unveiled the European Pillar of Social Rights, twenty grand principles on wages, leave, housing and work-life balance, bundled with seventeen other documents for good measure. None of it was requested by the member states who actually run welfare systems and pay for them, and Brussels could not quite decide whether it was law, a recommendation, or a heartfelt proclamation, so it published it as all three at once. The point was never the content but the posture: the Commission as moral compass, gently converging twenty-seven nations towards whatever it happens to think fair this decade. A pillar, in the end, holds up a roof you did not ask anyone to build.
1. Brussels drafts the family-leave rota
The same 26 April package included a directive telling every member state to grant fathers at least ten days of leave, ring-fence two months of parental leave as non-transferable, and hand carers five days a year. Whatever one thinks of the policy, the spectacle of the Commission micro-scheduling the domestic arrangements of half a billion people is the centralising instinct laid bare.
2. The schoolmaster grades Hungary
On 26 April the Commission decided to open infringement proceedings against Hungary over its higher-education law, firing off the letter of formal notice the very next day and declaring the statute incompatible with the freedoms enshrined in the EU Charter. Brussels can lecture a national parliament on academic freedom; persuading anyone it holds the moral high ground over the rest of the bloc is the harder trick.
→ globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu
3. Red lines drawn around the leavers
On 5 April the Parliament passed its Brexit resolution by 516 votes to 133, warning Britain against any "cherry picking", forbidding parallel trade talks, and insisting the four freedoms were indivisible. A Union that spent the month proclaiming new rights for everyone reserved its sternest tone for the nation exercising the oldest right of all, the right to leave.
4. Twenty-seven leaders, one approved opinion
On 29 April the EU27 met in special European Council to adopt their Brexit negotiating guidelines, after which Donald Tusk hailed the "outstanding unity" of all twenty-seven. Unity is easily achieved when the only permitted position is the one printed on the agenda; "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" simply means Britain agrees to wait.
5. Twenty principles, three legal forms, no commitment
Unable to decide what the Social Pillar actually was, the Commission helpfully issued the very same twenty principles twice over, once as a Recommendation and once as a draft proclamation, with identical wording, to be solemnly proclaimed at a summit in Gothenburg later in the year. A document so weighty it had to be published in triplicate, and so binding it commits nobody to anything at all.
6. A lap of honour for ending its own surcharge
On 6 April the Parliament cleared the final wholesale price caps, by 549 votes to 27, so that "roam like at home" could begin in June. The cheering rather glossed over the fact that it was Brussels which permitted the roaming surcharges for decades in the first place, then demanded gratitude for abolishing its own handiwork.
7. Thirteen years to relabel a hip implant
On 5 April the Parliament adopted the new Medical Devices Regulation, a long-promised tightening of certification after the breast and hip implant scandals. The reform was overdue, but it took two notorious patient-safety disasters and the better part of a decade to produce, which tells you rather more about the speed of the existing machinery than about its diligence.
8. Demanding accountability, naming nobody
On 4 April MEPs adopted recommendations on the diesel-emissions scandal, calling for tighter checks and an end to the loopholes that let manufacturers cheat. Stirring stuff, except the loopholes were written and waved through by the same institutions now expressing shock, and not one official who signed off on them faces any consequence whatsoever.
9. Phasing out the fuel it once subsidised
On 4 April the Parliament voted 640 to 18 to phase out palm oil from biofuels by 2020 and impose a single EU certification scheme. The same Union that spent years mandating biofuel targets now discovers the inconvenient hectares of cleared rainforest those targets required, and reaches, as ever, for a new certification scheme rather than an apology.
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