Eurobloat #0139 • November 2021
November was the month the Union remembered that it is a schoolmaster first and a club of equals never. It billed a member state by the day, fined an American company by the billion, voted itself a fatter budget, and discovered that a border you refuse to defend is not really a border at all.
Folly of the Month: Brussels starts charging a member state rent
From 3 November the European Commission began clawing back one million euros a day from Poland, a penalty the Court of Justice had imposed in October for Warsaw's refusal to scrap a disciplinary chamber for judges. When the cheque did not arrive, Brussels simply started subtracting the sum from the funds owed to Poland under the common budget. There is something gloriously honest about it: the Union no longer pretends to persuade its members, it just helps itself to their money until they obey. A club you cannot leave, run by a court you did not elect, funded by a budget it can dock at will.
1. The billion-euro habit gets a court's blessing
On 10 November the General Court dismissed Google's appeal and upheld the Commission's 2.42 billion euro fine over its shopping service. Brussels cannot build a search engine, a phone or a single product anyone wants to buy, but it has perfected the art of charging a toll on the people who can.
2. The open border meets a man with a stack of visas
By mid-November more than thirty thousand crossing attempts had piled up on the Belarus frontier, as Lukashenko flew migrants in from Iraq and Syria and pointed them west. A bloc that spent two decades preaching that borders are an embarrassment was suddenly very keen on the ones held by Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.
→ npr.org
3. Sanctions for the dictator, lectures for the defenders
On 15 November the Council broadened its sanctions criteria so it could finally target the airlines and officials ferrying people to the frontier. The same Brussels that scolds Warsaw over its fence now relies on that fence to hold the line it spent years insisting should not exist.
4. Your wages are now an EU competence
On 24 November Parliament voted, 443 to 192, to open negotiations on a directive on adequate minimum wages across the Union. The treaties expressly bar Brussels from setting pay, so naturally Brussels found a way to set the rules for setting pay instead. Competence is whatever the Commission can talk its way into.
5. A bigger budget for a smaller continent
On 24 November Parliament adopted the 2022 budget, 169.5 billion euros in commitments, dressed up as recovery, green transition and digital transition. The economy shrank, the energy bills climbed, and the one line that never goes down is the one that funds Brussels itself.
6. The farm-subsidy machine is reupholstered
The same plenary signed off the reformed Common Agricultural Policy for 2021 to 2027, complete with national strategic plans each member must submit to Brussels for grading. A third of the budget still flows to farming, and the great reform is mostly a new homework assignment for capitals that used to make their own agricultural choices.
7. Brussels orders up more migrants while Poland holds the line
On 25 November Parliament voted, 497 to 160, to demand new EU rules to grease the wheels of legal labour migration, complete with an "EU talent pool" to match outside applicants with employers and a fresh admission scheme for low and medium-skilled workers. In the same fortnight that a member state was begging for help to hold a border, the chamber decided what the continent really needed was a smoother pipeline for bringing more people in.
8. One database to see them all
On 25 November the Commission proposed a European Single Access Point, a central platform to vacuum up the financial and sustainability disclosures of every company in the Union. It is sold as convenience for investors, which is how every centralising scheme is sold, right up to the moment the convenience becomes compulsory.
9. The budget rules get a values upgrade
In the same session Parliament adopted a resolution on revising the Financial Regulation, urging that EU money be tied ever more tightly to "EU values" on the rule of law, climate and gender. Translation: Brussels would like a few more levers to pull when a national capital declines to think the approved thoughts.
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