Eurobloat #0149 • September 2022
September was the month the Commission discovered that the cure for an energy crisis is more Brussels, the cure for a media crisis is more Brussels, and the cure for losing sovereignty to China is, naturally, a fund run by Brussels.
Folly of the Month: A tax that is not a tax, raising €140 billion for the cause
On 14 September the Commission proposed an emergency intervention on energy markets: a cap on the revenues of electricity generators and a "solidarity contribution" of at least 33 per cent on the surplus profits of oil, gas and coal firms. The word "tax" was carefully avoided, for political and legal reasons, because the EU has no power to levy one, which is a small detail it would prefer you did not dwell on. The whole exercise was budgeted to raise €140 billion, a number arrived at with the usual Brussels precision, and the energy prices it was responding to were in no small part the harvest of a decade of the bloc's own dependence on Russian gas. The lesson, as ever, is that the people who built the bonfire would now like to be thanked for selling you the bucket.
1. A Sovereignty Fund, because sovereignty is now a federal programme
In her State of the Union on 14 September, Ursula von der Leyen announced a European Sovereignty Fund to keep industry "Made in Europe" and a Raw Materials Act to reduce dependence on China. Only in Brussels could the answer to losing your independence be a new pot of money administered by the people who took it.
2. Parliament grades a member state and finds it wanting
On 15 September MEPs voted 433 to 123 to declare that Hungary is no longer a full democracy but a "hybrid regime of electoral autocracy". The Parliament that cannot pass its own accounts without the auditors rolling their eyes has appointed itself examiner of everyone else's constitution.
3. And then reaches for the wallet
Three days later, on 18 September, the Commission recommended suspending €7.5 billion of EU funds to Hungary over corruption and procurement concerns. Whatever the merits of the case, the mechanism is the point: the budget has quietly become a lever to bend national governments into line, and the lever only ever pulls one way.
4. The Cyber Resilience Act, in case your doorbell needed a regulator
On 15 September the Commission proposed the Cyber Resilience Act, imposing security obligations across the lifecycle of any product "with digital components", from industrial software down to the humble connected gadget. A worthy aim, no doubt, wrapped in the familiar promise that nothing with a chip in it shall escape a Brussels compliance regime.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
5. A Media Freedom Act, supervised by a new European board
On 16 September the Commission unveiled the European Media Freedom Act, complete with a new European Board for Media Services to oversee the press across the Union. The bloc has decided that the surest guarantee of a free press is a fresh layer of EU officials sitting in judgement over it.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
6. €405 million for Instagram, because the fine is the policy
On 15 September the Irish regulator, acting under EU data law and prodded by the European Data Protection Board, fined Meta €405 million over the handling of children's accounts on Instagram. The second largest GDPR penalty to that date is less a remedy than a revenue stream, a reminder that the system measures success in the size of the cheque it can extract from an American firm.
7. The Court remembers that mass surveillance is illegal
On 20 September the Court of Justice ruled in SpaceNet and Telekom Deutschland that Germany's blanket retention of everyone's traffic and location data breaches EU law. A rare and welcome result: for once an EU institution told a government it may not hoover up the communications of the entire population on the off chance someone, somewhere, misbehaves.
8. A ban on forced-labour goods, enforced by yet more customs powers
Also on 14 September the Commission proposed banning products made with forced labour, with national authorities pulling goods from shelves and customs stopping them at the border, all underpinned by a Brussels-curated database of "risk" products. The cause is unimpeachable; the machinery, predictably, is one more centralised list deciding what may and may not cross the frontier.
9. A price cap on Russian oil, drafted by the people who bought the oil
In late September von der Leyen set out the legal basis for an EU price cap on Russian crude, the bloc's latest attempt to stop funding the war it spent twenty years quietly bankrolling at the petrol pump. Having made Europe dependent on Mr Putin's energy, Brussels now proposes to dictate the price at which it will keep buying it.
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