Eurobloat #0086 • June 2017
June was the month the Commission discovered that the cure for a problem it had spent ten years building is, naturally, more Commission. While Brussels reached for the wallets of American technology firms and the chequebooks of its own taxpayers, it also found time to sketch out a finance minister, a defence fund and a fresh set of EU taxes. Across the Channel, the people who had voted to leave began the polite business of doing so.
Folly of the Month: A 2.42 billion euro fine for arranging a shopping page
On 27 June the Commission fined Google 2.42 billion euros for the crime of putting its own price-comparison results near the top of its own search page. Seven years of investigation produced the largest competition penalty in the bloc's history, handed down by a body that has never built a search engine, written a useful product or faced a customer it could not subpoena. The theory is that consumers were harmed by being shown things they were searching for, which is a definition of harm that only a regulator could love. Brussels then warned that it would keep watching, in case anyone else dared to be popular.
1. A reflection paper that reflects mainly on new EU taxes
On 28 June the Commission published its Reflection Paper on the Future of EU Finances, a document whose central insight is that the EU should raise its own money through new categories of "own resources" rather than asking national capitals for it. Translated from Brussels, this means EU-level taxes that no national parliament gets to vote down. The word "reflection" is doing a great deal of work for what is plainly a wish list.
2. An EU finance minister nobody asked for
Published on 31 May and dominating the June debate, the Commission's reflection paper on deepening the Economic and Monetary Union floated a euro-area treasury, a European Monetary Fund and a "type of EU Finance Minister" by 2025. The cure for a currency union that has lurched from crisis to crisis is, apparently, to hand still more control to the people who designed it. Member states were invited to admire the destination while quietly losing the keys to their own budgets.
3. The European Council launches a defence chequebook
At the summit of 22 and 23 June, EU leaders agreed to launch Permanent Structured Cooperation and welcomed a European Defence Fund, with the cost of deploying battlegroups to be shifted onto the EU's common Athena mechanism. The continent that struggles to deploy a single battlegroup has decided the missing ingredient was a Brussels budget line. Nothing focuses the military mind like a new committee.
4. 5.5 billion euros a year for the European Defence Fund
On 7 June the Commission proposed a European Defence Fund worth up to 5.5 billion euros a year, complete with a research window and a capability window, because every Brussels initiative must arrive with at least two windows. The institution with no army and no soldiers now proposes to direct how Europe spends on both. The defence of the realm is safe in the hands of people whose chief weapon is the press release.
5. Roaming charges abolished, a decade after they were tolerated
On 15 June the EU triumphantly abolished mobile roaming surcharges, the climax of four separate regulations spread over ten years. Brussels presents as a gift the removal of a cost that existed largely because its own single market remained carved into national mobile fiefdoms. It is the arsonist taking a bow at the fire he eventually agreed to stop fanning.
6. Bullying member states into taking migrants they do not want
On 15 June the Commission launched infringement procedures against the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, punishing three governments for declining to accept asylum-seeker quotas dreamed up in Brussels. A scheme that was meant to be temporary and voluntary became permanent and compulsory the moment national capitals said no. The lesson of the migration crisis, apparently, is that the answer is to overrule the voters, not to control the borders.
7. The Parliament's plan for cookies and tracking by default
On 21 June the Parliament's civil liberties committee unveiled its draft ePrivacy report, proposing that browsers block tracking by default and that consent rules be tightened across the board. Wrapped in the language of privacy is yet another layer of EU-wide control over how every website on the continent must be built. The committee that cannot secure its own databases now wishes to redesign everyone else's.
8. Brexit talks begin, politely
On 19 June David Davis and Michel Barnier opened formal Brexit negotiations in Brussels, the first concrete step of a country exercising a power its membership was supposed to make unthinkable. The very existence of the talks is proof that leaving was always possible, whatever the doom-mongers insisted. One member at last gets to discover what life looks like on the other side of the rule book.
9. A million signatures against glyphosate, filed under "noted"
By June more than a million Europeans had signed the "Stop Glyphosate" citizens' initiative in record time, the fastest-growing such petition the EU had ever seen. The bloc that sells its citizens' initiative as proof of grassroots democracy duly received the demand and prepared to do precisely what it had already decided to do. Direct democracy in Brussels works beautifully, provided you do not expect it to change anything.
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