Eurobloat #0098 • June 2018
June was the month the Union decided that the cure for its woes was more committees, more binding targets and a tax on crisp packets. It also discovered, at five in the morning, that twenty-eight governments cannot agree on a migration policy, which is awkward for an institution that exists to harmonise them.
Folly of the Month: The committee that voted to filter the internet
On 20 June the Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee waved through the Copyright Directive, complete with Article 13 and Article 11. Article 13 told every website that lets you post anything to install machines that scan your uploads for copyright, reversing the old principle that the person who posts is the person responsible. Article 11, the so-called link tax, decided that quoting a headline now requires a licence. A handful of MEPs, lobbied to within an inch of their lives by publishers, thus appointed themselves architects of an automated censorship layer for an entire continent, and called it the digital single market.
→ eff.org
1. The all-night summit that solved nothing
On 28 and 29 June the leaders sat until dawn and emerged with a communique on migration that promised "controlled centres" somewhere and "regional disembarkation platforms" in North Africa, with no country named and no detail attached. Donald Tusk tweeted his triumph at five in the morning. The triumph was an agreement to keep disagreeing.
2. The ship the open-borders project left at sea
Earlier in the month the Aquarius, carrying 629 people, was turned away by Italy and Malta and drifted for over a week before Spain took it in on 17 June. The Union that lectures everyone on solidarity could not find a harbour for one boat, which rather undercuts the sermon.
→ hrw.org
3. A binding target, because suggestions are for the weak
On 14 June negotiators agreed a Renewable Energy Directive setting a binding EU-wide target of 32 per cent renewables by 2030, with sub-targets, caps and a certification scheme to phase out palm oil. Brussels could simply let member states pick their own energy mix. Instead it prefers a single number, decreed centrally, that every capital must then explain to its own voters.
4. A tax on plastic to plug the hole Britain left
With the United Kingdom on its way out and some 12 billion euros a year of net contribution departing with it, the Commission's answer in the rolling budget wrangle was a levy on non-recycled plastic packaging. It was sold as an environmental measure. It was, transparently, a new own resource: an EU-level tax, dressed in green, to keep the spending going after the net contributor walks away.
5. Paris and Berlin draft a budget for a currency
On 19 June, at Meseberg, Macron and Merkel declared their wish for a eurozone budget for "competitiveness, convergence and stabilisation". Translated, that is another pot of money administered from the centre, with governance left deliberately fuzzy and the size left deliberately small, so that nobody has to admit out loud where it is heading.
6. Eight years and 290 billion later, Greece is "fixed"
On 22 June the Eurogroup signed off the end of Greece's third bailout, deferring interest and amortisation on 96.4 billion euros of loans by ten years and adding a further 15 billion in fresh ESM money. After three programmes and a lost decade, the rescue concludes by lending Athens more so that it can repay what it was lent. Nobody in Brussels has been held to account for any of it.
7. The Parliament that shrank, briefly
In the June plenary MEPs approved by 566 to 94 a redistribution of seats after Brexit, cutting the chamber from 751 members to 705. A rare instance of the Union getting smaller. Do not get used to it: 46 of the freed-up seats were merely held in reserve for future enlargement.
8. A billion more for Ukraine, conditions permitting
The same plenary approved up to 1 billion euros in fresh macro-financial assistance to Ukraine for 2018 and 2019, conditional on anti-corruption progress. The Union hands over the money and attaches the homework afterwards, which is roughly the order of operations that produced item six.
9. Register your toy drone with the continent
Among June's aviation reforms came a tidy new requirement to register recreational drones, folded into a revamp of the European Aviation Safety Agency's powers. Nothing says serious institution quite like reaching down to log the model aircraft in your back garden under pan-European rules.
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