Eurobloat #0090 • October 2017
October was the month the EU acquired its own prosecutor, ordered a member state to take billions it did not want, and published a work programme promising to be more democratic by deciding more things on your behalf.
Folly of the Month: The EU appoints its own prosecutor
On 12 October the twenty member states still keen on the project gave final approval to Council Regulation 2017/1939, conjuring into being the European Public Prosecutor's Office, a brand new pan-European prosecuting authority headquartered in Luxembourg. National prosecutors, courts and parliaments have handled crimes against the public purse for centuries. Now Brussels has decided that protecting its own budget requires its own prosecutor, answerable to the Union rather than to any voter, because if there is one institution you would trust to police the spending of EU money, it is the body that spends it.
1. Parliament votes to let the law reach inside your messages
On 26 October the Parliament confirmed, by 318 votes to 280, its negotiating mandate on the ePrivacy Regulation, sending the file into trilogue. The mandate was sold as a victory for confidentiality, which is a curious way to describe a years-long Brussels project to write detailed rules about who may read, scan and process your private communications and on what terms. The principle that your conversations are nobody's business should not require six hundred members to vote on it.
2. Commission drags Ireland to court for charging too little tax
On 4 October the Commission referred Ireland to the Court of Justice for failing to claw back up to 13 billion euros in tax from Apple, money Dublin had repeatedly said it did not want and did not believe it was owed. A sovereign government set its own corporate tax arrangements, a company paid what that government asked, and Brussels decided both were wrong. The lesson for member states is plain: your tax policy is yours only until the Commission disagrees with it.
3. Luxembourg told to bill Amazon for 250 million euros
On the same day the Commission ruled that Luxembourg had granted Amazon illegal state aid worth around 250 million euros and must recover it. Once again a member state's own tax ruling was overturned from Brussels, and once again the Commission cast itself as the continent's tax inspector. Years later the courts would side with Luxembourg and Amazon, by which point the press releases had long since done their work.
4. An agenda for a more united, stronger and more democratic Europe
On 24 October the Commission unveiled its 2018 Work Programme, titled, without apparent embarrassment, "An agenda for a more united, stronger and more democratic Europe". Every Brussels work programme promises more democracy and delivers more directives, and this one followed Mr Juncker's State of the Union vision of a Union that grows by absorbing yet more competences. The word "democratic" in such documents has come to mean whatever the Commission has decided you should want.
5. Leaders push on towards an EU defence club
At the European Council of 19 and 20 October, EU leaders welcomed progress towards launching Permanent Structured Cooperation on defence and looked forward to its formal birth in December. Defence has always been the jealously guarded business of national governments, which is precisely why Brussels wants a piece of it, complete with regular assessments of how much each member state spends on its own armed forces. Notably the United Kingdom, on its way out, declined to sign up, which tells you something.
6. Parliament votes to phase out a weedkiller it cannot ban
On 24 October the Parliament voted, 355 to 204, for a resolution demanding that glyphosate be restricted at once and banned outright by the end of 2022. The resolution was non-binding, the science remained contested, and the actual decision lay with member states, none of which stopped the chamber from striking a pose about the contents of every farmer's shed. Few things are as reliably European as a vote that changes nothing while signalling that Brussels knows best what you may spray.
7. The migration strategy is "bringing results", apparently
The same October summit declared the EU's "comprehensive, pragmatic and resolute" migration strategy a success that should be consolidated, with leaders praising efforts to restore control of the external border and increase returns. The candour about controlling borders is welcome. Less welcome is the part of the strategy that leans on the Libyan coastguard, an arrangement that human rights groups spent the year documenting as a conveyor belt back into detention centres where torture is routine, which is a grubby foundation for a results-based boast.
8. Fresh sanctions on North Korea
On 16 October the Council tightened its sanctions on North Korea, banning the sale of natural gas liquids and the export of crude oil to Pyongyang and adding further entities and individuals to its asset-freeze list, transposing the latest UN Security Council resolution. This is the rare case of Brussels doing something a foreign-policy actor might reasonably do, namely following the United Nations rather than inventing a parallel scheme of its own. Enjoy it; such restraint does not last.
9. A prize, a sermon and a photograph
On 26 October the Parliament announced that its 2017 Sakharov Prize would go to Venezuela's democratic opposition, an entirely deserving cause that nonetheless served the institution's favourite ritual of awarding medals abroad while ducking the harder questions at home. The Parliament adores a freedom prize and a podium, the better to lecture distant tyrants without troubling itself about the democratic deficit on its own continent.
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