Eurobloat #0146 • June 2022
June 2022 was the month the Commission discovered that the way to save nature, the climate and your phone was to take a decision out of your hands and make it directly applicable in all twenty-seven member states at once. From your hedgerow to your kettle, Brussels was busy proving that no choice is too small to be centralised.
Folly of the Month: The hedgerow comes under Commission management
On 22 June the Commission unveiled its Nature Restoration Law and a Sustainable Use of Pesticides Regulation, the second of which it deliberately upgraded from a directive into a regulation so that it would be directly applicable in every member state, no national parliament required. The package sets legally binding targets to halve pesticide use by 2030 and to slap restoration duties on a fifth of the EU's land and sea, with a blanket ban on pesticides in anything that might be called a park, a playground or a sensitive area. National capitals once decided how to manage their own fields and verges. Now the answer arrives from a building in Brussels and applies whether you voted for it or not.
1. One charger to rule them all
After years of letting consumers pick their own cables, the Council and Parliament agreed on 7 June, with member states signing off on 29 June, that USB-C shall be the law of the land for phones, tablets, cameras and the rest. The market had already converged on a handful of ports without a statute, but Brussels was determined to legislate the survivors into a monopoly and call it consumer choice.
2. Parliament abolishes the engine
On 8 June MEPs voted, 339 to 249, to require a 100 per cent cut in car emissions by 2035, which is to say a ban on selling any new petrol or diesel car. Having mandated the destination, the Parliament left the small matter of charging infrastructure, grid capacity and where the electricity comes from for someone else to sort out later.
3. A carbon tax to wean Brussels off member states
On 22 June the Parliament adopted its position on the Emissions Trading System, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and a Social Climate Fund. The carbon border levy is openly billed as a new own resource, the polite term for a stream of money that flows to the EU budget directly rather than through the national treasuries that are supposed to control it.
4. Candidate status now, conditions later
On 23 June the European Council granted Ukraine and Moldova candidate status, contingent on seven reforms to be assessed at some unspecified future date. It was a historic gesture made at a summit, which is the EU's favourite kind, the sort that commits to enlargement in principle while quietly leaving the hard accession arithmetic for a successor to confront.
5. Brussels will scan your messages to keep you safe
Throughout June the Commission's Chat Control proposal, tabled on 11 May, dominated the privacy debate, demanding that messaging services scan everyone's communications for illegal material even where they are end-to-end encrypted. A public consultation had already shown most respondents against it, with more than eighty per cent opposed to applying it to end-to-end encrypted communications, yet the plan to read everybody's chats in the name of protecting some of them rolled on.
6. The COVID certificate stays for another year
On 23 June MEPs backed a one-year extension of the EU Digital COVID Certificate framework, keeping the scan-to-travel apparatus on the books until 30 June 2023 even as the emergency that birthed it faded. The temporary measure, as ever, proved remarkably difficult to switch off once the machinery existed.
7. A 40 per cent quota, set from the centre
On 7 June the Council and Parliament agreed the Women on Boards Directive, requiring listed companies to fill 40 per cent of non-executive board seats with the under-represented sex by 2026, complete with fines and annulled appointments for those who fall short. The file had been blocked in the Council for a decade because member states could not agree, which Brussels treated not as a verdict but as an obstacle to be ground down.
8. The minimum wage, now an EU competence in all but name
On 7 June negotiators agreed a directive on adequate minimum wages, obliging member states to assess the adequacy of their pay floors and to draw up action plans wherever collective bargaining covers less than 80 per cent of workers. Wages were once a matter for national governments and their own labour markets. Now they come with a Brussels framework, a target and an enforcement system attached.
9. Solidarity, so long as nobody has to do anything
On 22 June twenty-one states adopted a declaration on a voluntary solidarity mechanism for relocating asylum seekers, the key word being voluntary. After years of grand talk about sharing the burden, the EU produced a scheme under which each country picks its own contribution and its own beneficiary, which is to say a mechanism carefully engineered so that the open-borders ambition never quite meets an obligation.
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