Eurobloat #0125 • September 2020
September was the month the largest camp in Europe burned down while the Commission was busy drafting the very pact that was supposed to have prevented it. Brussels responded the only way it knows how: with a fresh rulebook, a fresh tax, a fresh sermon and a fresh pile of shared debt.
Folly of the Month: A migration pact that asks everyone to share a problem nobody wanted
On 23 September the Commission unveiled its New Pact on Migration and Asylum, five regulations and four recommendations promising to fix what a decade of EU asylum policy had broken. The centrepiece was a "permanent solidarity framework" obliging member states to either take in arrivals or sponsor their return, which is to say the capitals that never asked for open borders would now be graded on how cheerfully they cleaned up after them. The plan papered over the obvious lesson, that controlling who enters is the business of nations and not of a Brussels database, and rebranded the failure as a triumph of comprehensiveness. Four years later they were still arguing about it.
1. The camp burns down on schedule
On 8 September fire destroyed the Moria camp on Lesbos, leaving nearly thirteen thousand people homeless at a site built for barely three thousand. It was the predictable end of an EU border policy that warehoused human beings on a Greek island and called it solidarity, and the answer was to relocate a few thousand and build another camp.
→ hrw.org
2. Fingerprints for everyone at the gate
Tucked inside the same pact was a Screening Regulation requiring near-universal registration of biometric data, fingerprints and facial images, for almost anyone arriving irregularly, all funnelled into the Eurodac database. Controlling the border is sensible. Building a continent-wide biometric ledger and handing the keys to Brussels is how sensible becomes sinister.
3. The State of the Union sermon, now with extra Europe
On 16 September Ursula von der Leyen delivered her first State of the Union address and proposed lifting the 2030 emissions target from 40 to "at least 55" per cent, a number arrived at by the time-honoured method of picking a rounder figure than the last one. The speech was the usual liturgy: more ambition, more solidarity, more Europe, and a minimum-wage instrument to remind member states who sets their wages now.
4. Apple gets dragged back up the stairs
Having lost in July when the General Court found it had not proved its case, the Commission announced in September that it would appeal the Apple-Ireland ruling to the Court of Justice, refusing to accept that a sovereign state may set its own tax bargains. The thirteen billion euros stayed in escrow while Brussels prepared to spend years insisting a member state had been too generous with its own treasury.
5. The schoolmaster publishes its report cards
On 30 September the Commission issued its first annual Rule of Law Report, complete with country chapters grading members on courts, corruption and the press. Whatever the merits of the criticism of Warsaw and Budapest, the spectacle of an unelected executive marking the homework of elected governments is precisely the centralisation that drove one large island to leave.
6. The Court discovers it can ban your free data
On 15 September the Court of Justice ruled for the first time on the net-neutrality regulation and decided that "zero-rating" deals, the ones that let your phone stream certain apps without eating your data allowance, breach EU law. A bargain that consumers actually liked was struck down in the name of a principle, because in Brussels the rule matters more than the customer.
7. A whole new rulebook for money that did not need one
On 24 September the Commission unveiled its Digital Finance package, headlined by the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, a single harmonised framework to authorise and supervise an industry that had thrived precisely by escaping such frameworks. The pitch was innovation; the mechanism was, as ever, one rulebook to bind them all and Brussels to hold the pen.
8. A tax on plastic, payable to Brussels
In September the Parliament approved a new "own resource" based on non-recycled plastic packaging, a levy of eighty cents a kilo flowing into the EU budget from 1 January 2021. Dressed up as the circular economy, it was the thing Brussels has wanted for decades: a revenue stream of its very own, prised loose from national treasuries one rubbish bag at a time.
9. A hundred billion in joint debt, switched on quietly
On 22 September, once the last member state had signed its guarantee, the SURE instrument became available with a full envelope of a hundred billion euros to be raised on the markets in the EU's own name. Framed as emergency help for jobs, it was also the rehearsal nobody voted for: the precedent that Brussels may borrow vast sums against everyone's credit, a habit that, once acquired, is never given up.
Enjoyed this post?
Well, you could share the post with others, follow me with RSS Feeds and/or send me a comment via email.
Tags
Category:
Year: