Eurobloat #0093 • January 2018
A new year, a new presidency, and the same old reflex: every problem in Brussels turns out to need more money, more rules and more Brussels. January 2018 even managed to find a panel of 39 people to tell us which news is real.
Folly of the Month: The Brexit hole becomes an excuse for EU taxes
Britain had not even left, and already its departing cheque was the talk of the town. Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger spent January explaining that the looming gap of twelve to fifteen billion euros a year should be plugged half by cuts and half by what he gracefully called fresh money, meaning higher national contributions above the old one per cent ceiling plus new EU-level "own resources". So the lesson Brussels drew from one member state walking out over cost and control was to demand more cash from the rest and to start collecting taxes of its own. Berlin, The Hague, Vienna and Paris all said no, which tells you how popular the project of an EU treasury really is.
1. Qualcomm handed a 997 million euro bill
On 24 January the Commission fined Qualcomm 997 million euros for paying Apple to use its chips, a commercial arrangement reinvented by Brussels as a crime. The General Court later annulled the decision in its entirety, which is to say the year-long billion-euro verdict was wrong, though nobody at the Commission has offered to refund the lawyers.
2. A grand strategy against plastic
On 16 January the Commission unveiled a European Strategy for Plastics, promising that every scrap of plastic packaging would be reusable or recyclable by 2030 and trailing future bans on single-use items. It is a strategy in the truest Brussels sense: a press conference, a target a decade away, and a legislative proposal to be named later.
3. VAT "flexibility" that comes with a negative list
On 18 January the Commission offered member states more freedom to set reduced VAT rates, which sounds like power returning to capitals until you read the small print. The old list of permitted reductions is to be replaced by a "negative list" of things to which reduced rates may never apply, so Brussels keeps the veto and merely renames it generosity.
→ taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu
4. Thirty-nine experts to tell you what is true
On 15 January the Commission's High Level Expert Group on fake news and online disinformation met for the first time, 39 worthies assembled to advise on how the Union should police what citizens read. Nothing reassures the free citizen quite like a committee in Brussels appointing itself the referee of online truth.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
5. Parliament invents a tougher target it cannot meet
On 17 January MEPs voted to raise the binding 2030 renewables target to 35 per cent, well above the 27 per cent national governments had actually agreed. The Parliament does not run a single power station, but it does enjoy setting figures other people will have to deliver and then blaming them when the lights flicker.
6. The gravy train changes drivers
On 1 January Bulgaria took over the rotating presidency, its first ever, under the slogan "United we stand strong" and the shadow of being among the bloc's most graft-plagued members. A presidency promising security and unity, run from a capital best known to Brussels for corruption probes, is the EU's sense of irony at full throttle.
7. Mutual recognition, now with extra paperwork
On 23 January Parliament's researchers walked through the Goods Package plan to "improve" mutual recognition, the principle that a product lawful in one member state should be lawful in another. The fix for a single market the EU built but never finished is, naturally, a new self-declaration form, a non-judicial problem-solving procedure and yet more administrative cooperation.
8. A treaty for the blind, a year for the buildings
At its January plenary Parliament lined up the Marrakesh Treaty on access to books for blind readers alongside a launch of the European Cultural Heritage Year 2018. The good cause is real; the suspicion is that any month without a designated Year, theme or commemorative banner feels to Brussels like a month wasted.
9. Quotas everyone wants, that nobody will take
As Bulgaria opened its presidency in January it quietly decided to leave the most contentious part of the asylum reform, the mandatory relocation quotas, for the very end of the negotiations. The bloc that insists every nation must share out asylum seekers by formula could not get its own founding members to agree, so its new chair simply hid the quota question at the bottom of the file and hoped nobody would notice.
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