Eurobloat #0117 • January 2020
January 2020 was the month a founding-sized economy walked out of the front door, and the response from Brussels was to draft new rules for everyone who stayed. A trillion euros was promised, a tax on imports was threatened, and a committee was convened to ask citizens what they thought of an answer that had already been written.
Folly of the Month: The Parliament gives Brexit a tearful send-off, then carries on regulating
On 29 January the European Parliament ratified the UK Withdrawal Agreement by 621 votes to 49, and the United Kingdom left the Union at 11pm on 31 January. MEPs marked the occasion by linking arms and singing Auld Lang Syne, which is a curious way to treat a departure you have spent four years describing as a catastrophe of national self-harm. Not one figure in Brussels paused to ask whether a club that drives out its second-largest contributor might have a problem with the product rather than the customer. The lesson drawn was that the answer is more Europe, which is the only answer the machine knows how to give.
1. Brussels weighs banning your face for five years
A leaked draft of the Commission white paper on artificial intelligence floated a temporary ban of up to five years on facial recognition in public places, so that officials could work out how to regulate the technology they had not yet understood. The genuinely alarming part is not that the idea was dropped, but that an institution which treats face-scanning as a policy lever to be pulled at will was ever drawing up the lever in the first place.
2. One trillion euros, mostly other people's
On 14 January the Commission unveiled the European Green Deal Investment Plan, promising to mobilise at least one trillion euros over a decade. The trick is that very little of it is the EU's own money. It is a headline number conjured from member-state budgets, private capital it hopes to coax along and an accounting device called leverage, so that Brussels gets the press release and someone else gets the bill.
3. The Commission decides it should set your wages
Also on 14 January the Commission opened the first phase of consultation on EU-wide minimum wages, a subject that the treaties expressly leave to national capitals. The consultation politely promised to respect national traditions while quietly building the legal machinery to override them, which is how a competence the Union does not have becomes a directive it does.
4. The Parliament rules on the shape of your plug
On 30 January the Parliament passed a resolution by 582 votes to 40 demanding that the Commission table binding rules for a common phone charger by the summer, after more than a decade of resolutions saying the same thing. A continent that cannot agree on its own borders or budget has, with great solemnity, identified the cable as the menace it can finally master.
5. A two-year conference to confirm the predetermined answer
On 15 January the Parliament adopted its position on the Conference on the Future of Europe, a citizens' exercise whose conclusion was already in the brochure. Von der Leyen helpfully announced that she was open to Treaty change, which tells you the listening exercise had decided what it wanted to hear before a single citizen had spoken.
6. Davos hears Brussels threaten a tax on imports
At the World Economic Forum, von der Leyen warned China and other large emitters to price their carbon or face a new EU carbon border tax. Set aside the climate framing and look at the mechanism: a fresh revenue stream that flows to Brussels rather than to national treasuries, dressed as planetary virtue and aimed at goods made by other people.
7. A 6.7 million euro fine for letting Britons book a hotel
The Commission fined the Spanish hotel group Meliá 6.7 million euros for contracts with tour operators that limited cross-border bookings. The offence, in plain terms, was that a Spaniard might pay a different price from a German for the same room, a heresy against the single market that apparently warrants several million euros of corporate punishment.
8. The Parliament thinks the Green Deal is not ambitious enough
Having just been promised a trillion euros, the Parliament voted on 15 January to back the Green Deal while demanding that it go further and faster, and complaining that it lacked a gender perspective. No sum is ever sufficient and no target ever final, because the point of the exercise is not to reach a destination but to justify the journey.
9. A summit on Libya the EU could not enforce
On 19 January the Berlin Conference on Libya produced solemn pledges to respect a UN arms embargo that everyone present was busy breaking. The EU responded by laying the ground for a naval mission while its open Mediterranean borders and grubby reliance on Ankara and assorted militias remained the actual policy, and its border agency Frontex saw its budget swell by more than thirty per cent for the privilege.
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