Eurobloat #0088 • August 2017
August is the month the Eurocrats are meant to be on a beach. Instead they spent it bankrolling Libyan militias, threatening the United States to keep Russian gas flowing, and gravely capping the wattage of your hoover.
Folly of the Month: Brussels outsources the borders it will not control
The grand open-borders project hit its limits in the Mediterranean, so Italy and the EU quietly did what they always swore was unconscionable: they paid other people to stop the boats. On 27 July the bloc adopted a 42 million euro border management programme for Libya from its Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, run by the Italian interior ministry and aimed at building up the Libyan coastguard, and arrivals duly fell: sea crossings to Italy roughly halved between June and July. The lesson, that controlling a border works, is one Brussels will accept only when it can pay a foreign force to do the controlling and look the other way at the conditions in the camps. Better still, it gets to lecture about human rights while writing the cheques.
→ thelocal.it → trust-fund-for-africa.europa.eu
1. Juncker threatens America to keep Russian gas flowing
When the United States Congress moved to tighten sanctions on Russia, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker warned that, if European concerns were not heeded, the EU stood "ready to act appropriately within a matter of days." The thing Brussels was so keen to defend? Nord Stream 2, the pipeline pumping Kremlin gas into Germany. A union that sermonises about values discovered its red line is cheaper energy from Moscow.
→ rusi.org
2. The single market cannot keep an insecticide out of its eggs
Millions of eggs across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France were pulled from sale after the banned insecticide fipronil turned up in them, and by August the alert had reached 22 of the 28 member states. On 28 August the European Parliament concluded the real problem was that the bloc's alert system needed to share information faster. Twenty-eight harmonised food-safety regimes, and the headline finding is that they should email each other sooner.
3. Twenty-three cities queue up to feed off Brexit
By 1 August twenty-three cities had lodged bids to host the two EU agencies fleeing London, nineteen chasing the Medicines Agency and eight the Banking Authority. Britain votes to leave and the immediate continental reflex is an unseemly scramble over who gets the gravy. Brexit, it turns out, is good for clarifying exactly what these agencies are really about.
4. Barnier explains that leaving means obeying anyway
At the third round of Brexit talks from 28 to 31 August, the EU's Michel Barnier reported "no decisive progress on any of the principal subjects" and held to the line he had laid down in July, that "you cannot be outside the single market and shape its legal order." A candid admission: membership is a one-way ratchet, and the price of departure is to keep taking the rules with no say in them. Precisely the cage Britain voted to leave.
→ cnbc.com
5. Macron's mission to export France's labour law
Through August the push to revise the Posted Workers Directive gathered pace, with Paris leading the charge to extend it to lorry drivers and squeeze the wage gap. Dressed up as fairness, it is a scheme to force higher-cost Western labour rules onto cheaper Eastern hauliers so French firms stop losing the work. Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Spain and Portugal all objected, which in Brussels counts as a mandate.
6. The Commission declares war on your vacuum cleaner
A Commission communication published in the Official Journal on 11 August tidied up the rules under which, from 1 September 2017, vacuum cleaners sold in the EU may draw no more than 900 watts. While the borders leak and the eggs poison themselves, the finest legal minds of the continent were busy rationing the suck of your hoover. Sovereignty surrendered, dirt retained.
7. Brussels discovers the East gets the cheaper biscuits
Complaints rumbled through the summer that big brands were selling lower-quality versions of identical-looking products in central and eastern member states. The Commission, which had earlier found no firm evidence of a problem, geared up to issue guidance and turn fish fingers into a question of European solidarity. A single market that cannot agree what is in the tin now needs a directive to police the recipe.
8. Roam like at home, brought to you by a price control
The EPRS spent 7 August celebrating that since 15 June using your phone abroad in the EU costs the same as at home. A genuine convenience, achieved the Brussels way: by capping wholesale prices, bolting on "fair use" rules to stop you actually roaming permanently, and presenting a market intervention as a gift from the institutions. Enjoy your free lunch, which someone is quietly paying for.
9. Germany's diesel summit, where the lobby wrote the homework
At Berlin's August "diesel summit" carmakers offered software updates for 5.3 million cars rather than recalls, with green and consumer groups not even in the room. Two years after Dieselgate, the system built to catch the cheating instead helped the cheats manage the fallout, while Brussels pointed proudly at testing rules arriving conveniently on 1 September. Nobody, naturally, was held to account.
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