Eurobloat #0130 • February 2021
A short month, but Brussels still found time to vote itself a metadata pile, send its top diplomat to be publicly humiliated in Moscow, and approve a recovery fund that quietly assumes brand new EU-level taxes will one day appear to pay for it.
Folly of the Month: The Council decides your private messages should be kept just in case
On 10 February the member states' ambassadors in Coreper finally agreed a Council position on the ePrivacy Regulation, the law that is supposed to protect the confidentiality of your communications. Tucked inside it is a provision allowing the bulk retention of traffic and location data, who you contacted, when, and from where, as a preventive measure. This is the same indiscriminate retention that the Court of Justice has repeatedly told governments is disproportionate, now smuggled back in by the very institution that lectures the world about fundamental rights. A privacy law whose headline feature is a licence to hoard everyone's metadata is a fitting monument to how Brussels thinks.
1. Borrell goes to Moscow, comes back lighter by three diplomats
The EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell flew to Moscow at the start of February to lecture the Kremlin about Alexei Navalny, and while he was sitting in the room Russia expelled three EU diplomats. He returned to tell the Parliament that relations were at their lowest level and that Moscow wants to divide the West, which is roughly what everyone told him before he booked the flight.
2. The vaccine export checkpoint that nearly closed the Irish border
February opened with the wreckage of the Commission's plan to invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol to stop vaccines crossing into the United Kingdom, a move so reckless it was withdrawn before midnight. Ursula von der Leyen spent the month expressing regret while keeping the export authorisation mechanism running, an open trading bloc that had discovered it rather likes export controls after all.
3. Parliament waves through 672.5 billion euros it cannot yet pay for
On 10 February MEPs approved the Recovery and Resilience Facility by 582 votes to 40, unlocking 672.5 billion euros in grants and loans, the centrepiece of the borrowed Next Generation EU pile. The repayment plan rests on new EU-level own resources, plastic levies, a digital tax, a carbon border charge, that do not yet exist, which is a novel way to run a household budget.
4. The plastic tax that funds Brussels by the kilogram
Sitting underneath that recovery fund is the plastics own resource, 800 euros per tonne of non-recycled plastic packaging waste, billed as an environmental nudge but functioning as the EU's first member-state contribution dressed up as a green virtue. A think tank spelled it out in February: it is a levy on national treasuries, and the planet will scarcely notice.
→ cep.eu
5. Sanctions on Russia, agreed only after the snub
Having been humiliated in person, EU foreign ministers met on 22 February and agreed to sanction four Russian officials over Navalny's jailing. The timeline tells the story: the bloc could not bring itself to act until its own envoy had been thoroughly embarrassed, and even then it reached for four names rather than a policy.
6. A trade enforcement law for the disputes the EU keeps losing
On 10 February the Parliament and Council adopted Regulation 2021/167, arming the Commission to hit trading partners with countermeasures and to extend the retaliation into services and intellectual property. The official reason is that the WTO appeals system is paralysed, so Brussels has decided that if the referee is unavailable it will simply award itself the penalty.
7. Parliament marks the ECB's homework and asks for more competitiveness
In the February plenary MEPs adopted a resolution on the European Central Bank's annual report, endorsing the crisis response with one hand while calling for reforms to strengthen competitiveness with the other. A Parliament that cannot create a single competitive firm of its own gravely instructing the central bank to go and find some is the Brussels genre in miniature.
8. Binding targets for everything, courtesy of the circular economy
The Parliament adopted a resolution on the new Circular Economy Action Plan, demanding binding 2030 targets to cut the use of primary raw materials across the entire economy. Brussels noting that recycled materials made up only twelve per cent of inputs in 2019 and concluding the answer is more binding EU targets is the reflex that built the red tape it now promises, elsewhere, to cut.
9. Who gets to police your timeline, debated at length
The same plenary held a debate on the democratic scrutiny of social media, with members insisting that law enforcement in digital services must remain with public authorities in the EU. Translated, the institution that wants to retain your metadata also wants to decide what counts as acceptable speech on your screen, and would prefer that the deciding be done from Brussels.
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: