Eurobloat #0091 • November 2017
November was the month the great machine decided the future of a chemical by coin toss, gave away the city of London's spoils by lottery, and proclaimed twenty new social rights it had no intention of paying for. Onward, ever onward, to more Europe.
Folly of the Month: Five more years of glyphosate, decided by one confused German
For two years the Commission could not get the member states to agree whether to relicense glyphosate. On 9 November the standing committee failed again to reach a qualified majority, so the question was bounced to an appeal committee, the bureaucratic equivalent of asking the same crowd a second time and hoping for a different answer. On 27 November Germany's caretaker agriculture minister suddenly voted in favour, against the stated wishes of his own coalition partners, and that single muddled ballot tipped the scales to renew the weedkiller across the entire continent for five years. A market of five hundred million people now lives under a chemical regime nobody could honestly say they voted for, decided by a minister who could not say he had cleared it with his own government.
1. Two London agencies handed out by drawing lots
On 20 November the EU27 ministers settled where to dump the Medicines Agency and the Banking Authority that Brexit was prising out of London. Both votes ended in a tie, so Amsterdam beat Milan for the medicines agency on a coin toss and Paris beat Dublin for the banks by drawing lots from a bowl. The location of two flagship institutions, and the jobs of hundreds, decided by the same method one uses to choose who buys the next round.
2. Twenty new social rights, proclaimed and unfunded
At a summit in Gothenburg on 17 November the Parliament, Council and Commission solemnly proclaimed the European Pillar of Social Rights, twenty principles on jobs, pay and welfare. Brussels was careful to stress that the proclamation is not legally binding, which is the polite way of admitting it is a press release with a ribbon on it. A continent that cannot agree on a weedkiller now has a fresh charter of promises that it has cheerfully announced it need not keep.
3. A defence union, signed by twenty-three
On 13 November ministers from twenty-three member states signed the joint notification launching Permanent Structured Cooperation, the long-dreamed-of military integration project that NATO already does and does better. The treaty calls it cooperation between sovereign armies, but the direction of travel is, as ever, one way: towards common projects, common funds and a common command in Brussels. It is a good thing the United Kingdom voted to leave before being asked to chip in.
4. The 2018 budget: one hundred and sixty billion and rising
In its November plenary the Parliament approved a 2018 budget of 160.11 billion euros in commitments, with more money poured into Horizon, Erasmus and the youth schemes that have been employing consultants since before most graduates were born. The figures only ever travel in one direction, and the United Kingdom's contribution will soon be missing from the top of the column. Nobody in Brussels appears to have noticed.
5. A single EU VAT area, because tax is too national
The November plenary cheered along the fair taxation package, the centrepiece of which is a single EU value-added tax area. The pitch is that fraud will fall and cross-border trade will rise. The reality is one more lever of taxation drawn quietly up from the member states towards a centre that has never met a power it did not wish to harmonise.
6. Brussels grades Poland and reaches for Article 7
On 15 November the Parliament passed a resolution scolding Warsaw over judicial reforms and inviting the machinery of Article 7, the treaty's nuclear button for stripping a member state of its vote. Whatever one makes of Poland's courts, the spectacle of an unelected Brussels staffing the headmaster's study and summoning a sovereign government to explain itself tells you exactly where power is meant to sit. It is not in any national capital.
7. The summit that funded the camps it deplored
On 29 and 30 November leaders gathered in Abidjan for the EU-Africa summit, overshadowed by footage of African migrants being sold at slave auctions in Libya. The same Union now pledging to evacuate the camps had spent months paying to keep migrants penned on the African side of the Mediterranean, a policy of paying unsavoury middlemen to do the dirty work out of sight. Outsourcing the border to Tripoli was always going to end somewhere ugly.
8. The Paradise Papers, debated by the lecturers of tax morality
On 14 November the Parliament debated the Paradise Papers leak, wringing its hands over offshore avoidance with the practised outrage of an institution whose own headquarters city is one of the more inventive tax jurisdictions on the continent. The remedy proposed, naturally, was more EU-level tax powers. Every scandal, however caused, ends with the same prescription written by the same physician.
9. Cookie banners, now with the force of regulation
The ePrivacy file ground on through November, the reform that gave Europe its most enduring contribution to civilisation: the pop-up box asking permission to remember you visited. Sold as a one-click simplification of consent, it has in practice produced a continent of citizens clicking accept on banners they neither read nor wanted, a monument to the nanny instinct that legislates the trivial while the serious goes unsolved.
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