Eurobloat #0115 • November 2019
November brought a fresh College of Commissioners, a symbolic emergency, a bigger budget and a new central banker keen to teach Germans how to spend. Brussels was busy declaring things, none of which it intends to do itself.
Folly of the Month: A new Commission, the same old promises
On 27 November the Parliament installed the von der Leyen Commission by 461 votes to 157, with 89 members abstaining rather than commit to an opinion. The team had already been delayed because three nominees were rejected over conflicts of interest and other embarrassments, which is a reassuring start for the body that grades everyone else on integrity. Its first headline ambition is a "geopolitical Commission" that will, in the President's words, help shape the global order, a modest goal for an executive that nobody elected and that cannot agree where to house its own Parliament. The continent that had just watched Britain vote to leave was told the answer to its troubles was, as ever, more Europe.
1. Parliament declares a climate emergency it cannot end
On 28 November the Parliament voted 429 to 225 to declare a "climate and environmental emergency", becoming the first continent to do so. The resolution obliges Brussels to do precisely nothing, which is the great advantage of declaring emergencies you have no intention of personally addressing.
2. A bigger budget, naturally
On 27 November members approved the 2020 budget, reversing most of the Council's cuts and adding some 400 million euros above the Commission's draft for Parliament's own priorities. When the institutions disagree about money, the citizen can always guess which direction the final figure will move.
3. The new ECB chief wants you to spend more
Christine Lagarde took over the European Central Bank on 1 November, having already told governments running surpluses, Germany and the Netherlands chiefly, that they ought to loosen their purse strings and invest more. A decade of negative rates having achieved so little, the obvious remedy is for other people to open their wallets.
→ rte.ie
4. Luxembourg lectures Warsaw, part one
On 5 November the Court of Justice ruled in Commission v Poland (C-192/18) that Poland's lower retirement age for ordinary court judges, set differently for men and women, breached EU law. The remedy for democratic backsliding is, apparently, a court in another country quietly redrawing the rules a member state's own parliament passed.
5. Luxembourg lectures Warsaw, part two
A fortnight later, on 19 November, the same Court ruled in the joined A.K. cases that national judges may themselves disapply a chamber of Poland's own Supreme Court if they judge it insufficiently independent. Brussels calls this defending the rule of law; from Warsaw it looks like instructing judges to ignore their own highest court.
6. A report on watching your face
On 27 November the EU Fundamental Rights Agency published its study on police use of facial recognition, warning that scanning crowds at demonstrations chills the freedom to assemble and that the technology still misidentifies people. It is welcome that someone in Brussels noticed, even as member states quietly buy the cameras anyway.
7. The Parliament rules against itself on GM crops, again
On 14 November the Parliament adopted yet more resolutions objecting to the Commission's authorisation of genetically modified maize and cotton, repeating a ritual it performs several times a year. The Commission waves the products through regardless, so the votes serve mainly to remind everyone that the two halves of the Union cannot agree on dinner.
8. Grading a member state's schoolbooks
Also on 14 November the Parliament passed a resolution condemning a Polish draft law on sex education and demanding the national legislature reject it. Whatever the merits, an assembly in Strasbourg telling a sovereign parliament which bills to drop is the schoolmaster habit in its purest form.
9. Ratify the convention, the rest of you
On 28 November the Parliament voted 500 to 91 to demand the Council finally conclude EU accession to the Istanbul Convention and to press the seven member states that have not ratified it to do so "without delay". Brussels has been unable to complete its own signature for years, which makes the lecture to the laggards all the more impressive.
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