Eurobloat #0129 • January 2021
The first full month outside the customs union, and the EU spent it proving the case for leaving. A slow vaccine rollout, a panicked grab for export powers, and a hard border invoked by accident: a vintage January from the people who said they alone could be trusted with the single market.
Folly of the Month: The accidental hard border in Ireland
For four years Brussels insisted that the sanctity of the Irish frontier was a moral absolute, the one red line over which no Brexit could be permitted to cross. Then on 29 January, in a fit of vaccine nationalism, the Commission reached for Article 16 of its own Northern Ireland Protocol to choke off jabs crossing the border, the very emergency brake it had spent years telling London never to touch. It did not consult Dublin, it did not notify the Joint Committee, and within hours, after a chorus of fury from every party in Belfast plus both prime ministers, it quietly deleted the proposal and called the whole thing an oversight. An oversight. The single most sacred clause in the entire Brexit settlement, triggered and untriggered before teatime.
1. The vaccine export wall
Having ordered late and haggled over pennies, the Commission spent late January discovering that other countries had simply bought more. Its answer, unveiled on 29 January and in force the next day, was a "transparency and authorisation mechanism" letting Brussels block exports of jabs made on its soil. A bloc built on the free movement of goods reinvented itself overnight as a customs checkpoint, which is one way to make the Brexiteers look prophetic.
2. The unredacted contract
Under pressure over missing doses, the Commission triumphantly published its AstraZeneca contract on 29 January with the sensitive bits blacked out. It then forgot to delete the PDF bookmarks, so anyone who opened the Adobe sidebar could read every redacted figure, including the upfront payments it had been so keen to hide. Transparency by accident, the only kind Brussels seems able to manage.
3. The rollout that was "unacceptably slow"
By the end of January the United Kingdom had given eleven doses per hundred people; Germany had managed 2.6, France 1.8. Centralised procurement, the great prize of pooling sovereignty, delivered fewer jabs more slowly than the country that had just walked out. The Commission's own people called the campaign unacceptably slow, which was generous.
4. An Ombudsman inquiry into the secret deals
While the Commission lectured a drug company on broken promises, the European Ombudsman opened an inquiry in January into the Commission's own opaque handling of the vaccine contracts. The institution that demands transparency from everyone else turns out to need a watchdog of its own. The doses were late, but the cover story arrived right on schedule.
5. Contain the immense power of the digital companies
At Davos on 26 January, Ursula von der Leyen announced that Europe must "contain this immense power of the big digital companies" and invited Washington to help write a worldwide rulebook for the internet. Brussels could not deliver a vaccine on time, but it was quite sure it should be regulating the algorithms of firms on another continent. The cure for every European failure is always more European rules for somebody else.
→ cnbc.com
6. The one-stop shop tightens its grip
On 13 January the Court of Justice's Advocate General delivered his Opinion in the Facebook Ireland case on the GDPR, blessing the "one-stop shop" that funnels cross-border data cases through a single lead regulator. A scheme sold as convenience for citizens works rather well as a mechanism for centralising enforcement away from national authorities. The data stays where you left it; the power moves to Brussels.
7. Frontex, the watchdog that watches itself
On 29 January the Parliament's civil liberties committee launched a Frontex Scrutiny Working Group to investigate the pushback allegations dogging the EU border agency since October. So the bloc that cannot control its external frontier has answered the failure in the only way Brussels knows how: with another committee, mandated to spend four months asking whether the agency it funds has been breaking the law. Open borders within, a working group without: the worst of both worlds, fully funded.
8. More sanctions, more sermons on Russia
On 21 January the Parliament voted 581 to 50 to demand much tougher measures against Moscow over the jailing of Alexei Navalny, including a halt to Nord Stream 2. Stirring stuff, except the Parliament does not set foreign policy, cannot impose a single sanction, and Berlin had no intention of stopping its pipeline. A strongly worded resolution remains the EU's favourite substitute for power it does not have.
9. A "Social Europe" wage to be set from above
The Portuguese presidency opened in January with a flagship pledge to push the directive on adequate minimum wages, billed as a triumph of Social Europe. Wage-setting has always been a matter for national parliaments and national bargaining, which is precisely why Brussels now wants a hand in it. Every crisis is an opportunity, and the opportunity is always to do more from the centre.
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: