Eurobloat #0145 • May 2022
May 2022 was the month the Commission proposed to scan every message you send, Brussels resolved to take away the one thing that lets a small country say no, and everyone agreed the answer to the EU's problems was, as ever, more EU.
Folly of the Month: Brussels would like to read your messages, for the children
On 11 May the Commission tabled its Regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse, a proposal so wholesome in name and so authoritarian in substance that it has earned the nickname "Chat Control". Under it, messaging and email providers can be ordered to scan everyone's private communications for forbidden content, end-to-end encryption included, by bolting detection software onto your own device before the encryption even engages. The Commission insisted nobody's privacy was at risk, while proposing the largest mandatory surveillance of private correspondence ever drafted in a democracy, justified by the oldest excuse in the book. Even the Parliament's own commissioned study later concluded the technology does not work without flagging mountains of innocent messages, which is the only reassuring thing about it.
1. A year of staged debate concludes that the answer is more Brussels
On 9 May, fittingly on Europe Day, the Conference on the Future of Europe wrapped up a year of choreographed "citizen dialogue" and handed over 49 proposals, among them a demand that nearly every decision now taken by unanimity be shifted to majority voting so that no single member state can ever again say no. Von der Leyen took the stage to declare herself ready to change the treaties if need be, which tells you exactly which of the 49 conclusions Brussels was always going to like best.
2. Apple charged for the crime of designing its own phone
On 2 May the Commission sent Apple a Statement of Objections over Apple Pay, having decided that the company's refusal to hand its NFC chip to rival wallet makers was an abuse of dominance rather than, say, a product decision. Brussels knows better than Apple how an iPhone should work, and intends to prove it one fine at a time.
3. The Commission will now do your gas shopping for you
On 18 May the REPowerEU plan arrived, and with it the promise of a "joint purchasing mechanism" through which the Commission would aggregate demand and negotiate gas contracts on behalf of the member states. Energy policy, long a national competence, quietly becomes one more thing best handled centrally by people who have never run a pipeline.
4. Twenty-eight phantom MEPs for a country that does not exist
On 3 May the Parliament voted, 323 to 262, to invent a pan-European constituency electing twenty-eight extra MEPs from transnational party lists. Voters who already struggle to name their own member are to be given a slate of foreign strangers to elect to a parliament with no European nation behind it.
5. A brand-new agency to police your phone, conveniently in The Hague
The same Chat Control proposal of 11 May would erect an entirely new "EU Centre on Child Sexual Abuse", sited next to Europol, to coordinate the scanning of everyone's messages. When Brussels finds a problem it cannot solve, the reflex is never to do less, but to build another headquarters with another payroll.
6. Growth down, prices up, confidence undimmed
The Commission's Spring 2022 Economic Forecast, published in May, slashed the growth outlook and jacked up the inflation forecast, blaming the war for an energy crisis that years of Brussels energy policy had done so much to invite. The institution that helped engineer the EU's dependence on Russian gas now arrives to forecast the consequences with a straight face.
→ economy-finance.ec.europa.eu
7. A sanctions package held hostage, and the cracks on display
On 30 and 31 May leaders finally agreed a sixth sanctions package and a partial oil embargo, but only after Hungary, dependent on Russian pipeline crude, forced an exemption and ground the whole thing to a halt for weeks. Twenty-seven members, one Kremlin-friendly holdout, and a "union" that cannot move until its most awkward member is bought off: a perfect advert for the veto the Parliament wants to abolish.
→ npr.org
8. Stricter limits on chemicals, because the old limits were apparently too relaxed
On 3 May the Parliament adopted a report demanding tougher limits than the Commission itself had proposed on persistent organic pollutants in waste, in pursuit of a "toxic-free" environment. When the unelected Commission's own micro-regulation is judged insufficiently strict by the Parliament, you know the ratchet only turns one way.
9. Everyone gets a clean bill of health, except the border agency under investigation
On 4 May MEPs signed off the 2020 budget discharge, waving through the Commission and dozens of agencies, while quietly postponing the discharge for Frontex pending an OLAF fraud probe and for the Council, which simply refuses to be scrutinised at all. The accounts are approved, the awkward bits are deferred, and nobody is ever quite responsible for the money.
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