Eurobloat #0126 • October 2020
October 2020 was the month the European Union decided that climate targets, minimum wages and the rules of the entire internet were all properly settled in Brussels, while quietly publishing a work programme promising even more of the same. Outside the bubble, a pandemic raged; inside it, the priority was a higher carbon number than anyone had asked for.
Folly of the Month: Parliament outbids the Commission on carbon
On 8 October the European Parliament voted, by 392 to 161, to demand a 60 per cent cut in emissions by 2030, overtaking the Commission's own freshly minted 55 per cent figure as the most extravagant promise on the table. This is centralisation as auction: a target plucked above the executive's number, then handed down to twenty-seven national economies as homework. Nobody who voted for it will have to find the heat pumps, the grid or the money, and nobody will be held to account when the bill arrives. The European Council, sensibly, declined to ratify the bidding war and kicked the whole question to December.
1. The Court remembers privacy, with caveats
On 6 October the Court of Justice ruled that the general and indiscriminate retention of everyone's traffic and location data was incompatible with fundamental rights, striking at the surveillance regimes of France, Belgium and the departing United Kingdom. A welcome verdict, though the Grand Chamber could not resist drilling in national-security exceptions wide enough to drive a data centre through, so that mass retention is forbidden in principle and permitted whenever a government feels sufficiently nervous.
2. Golden passports are scandalous, now that it is Cyprus and Malta
On 20 October the Commission opened infringement proceedings against Cyprus and Malta for selling EU citizenship to anyone with a spare million or two, having watched the trade flourish for years. The principle invoked is that Union citizenship requires a genuine link to a member state, a standard the EU is happy to enforce against small islands while building schemes to spread newcomers across the bloc by mandate.
3. Solidarity, meaning your share of everyone else's arrivals
Through October the German presidency laboured over the new Pact on Migration and Asylum, whose centrepiece is a "mandatory but flexible" solidarity mechanism obliging member states to relocate asylum seekers, sponsor returns or otherwise pay up. Member states that would rather control their own borders discovered that solidarity is compulsory and the flexibility is mostly about how you contribute, not whether.
4. A work programme to do even more
On 19 October the Commission unveiled its 2021 work programme under the title "A Union of vitality in a world of fragility", which translated from Brussels means a fresh stack of regulations, levies and directives for a continent already drowning in them. The cure for the burden of EU rules is, reliably, more EU rules.
5. Brussels appoints itself wage-setter
On 28 October the Commission proposed a directive on adequate minimum wages, advancing into pay policy that the treaties leave to member states and their own bargaining traditions. Six countries that set no statutory minimum at all were assured they would not be forced to introduce one, which rather concedes the point that the EU had no business legislating here in the first place.
6. A digital levy to feed the budget
The same 19 October work programme confirmed plans for a digital levy, billed both as a tax and as an "own resource" to fund the Union directly. The distinction matters: a national tax answers to a national parliament, whereas an own resource answers to Brussels, which is precisely why Brussels wants one.
7. Parliament drafts the rulebook for the internet
On 20 October Parliament adopted three resolutions setting out its demands for the coming Digital Services Act, including powers to police content, platforms and providers across the bloc. Having decided that the internet is too important to leave to its users, the EU set about claiming the authority to moderate it, fine it and instruct it, with the actual proposal still two months away.
8. And the rulebook for the machines
The same plenary waved through three reports demanding an EU framework of ethical principles, civil liability rules and intellectual-property regime for artificial intelligence, a technology Europe has conspicuously failed to build. Unable to produce a single significant AI champion, the Union resolved instead to regulate the ones other people make.
9. The Parliament that will not sign off its own accounts
Also on 20 October, Parliament refused to grant discharge to the 2018 accounts of the European Council, the Council and the Economic and Social Committee, citing a persistent lack of transparency about how the money was spent. An institution that cannot account for its own spending nonetheless spent the month lecturing member states on targets, wages and citizenship.
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