Eurobloat #0150 • October 2022
October was the month the Union decided which plug you may use, which engine you may buy and how much of an energy firm's profit belongs to it rather than to you. In between, it refused to sign off the accounts of the agency it pays to guard a border that 42,000 people crossed without asking.
Folly of the Month: Brussels invents a single charger, and a single market emergency squad to go with it
On 4 October the Parliament voted 602 to 13 to make USB-C the law of the land, so that by late 2024 every phone, tablet and camera sold across 27 countries must carry the port Brussels prefers. A continent at war and short of gas paused to legislate the shape of a hole. The Commission promises consumers will save 250 million euros a year, a figure produced by the same institution that cannot say where its own billions went. Saving you from the indignity of owning two cables is, apparently, exactly what a supranational government is for.
1. The combustion engine gets its execution date
On 27 October negotiators agreed that from 2035 no new petrol or diesel car may be sold anywhere in the Union, a provisional ban inked first and consulted on never. The plan would later be quietly reopened to admit e-fuels once Germany noticed what it had signed, which tells you how carefully the original was thought through.
2. A windfall tax with a friendlier name
On 6 October the Council adopted Regulation 2022/1854, a "solidarity contribution" on oil, gas and coal profits plus a cap on electricity revenues, expected to hoover up around 140 billion euros. Calling a tax a contribution does not make it voluntary, and routing energy-company money through Brussels arithmetic is centralisation wearing a high-visibility jacket.
3. The border force whose accounts could not be signed
On 18 October MEPs refused to discharge Frontex's 2020 budget, citing illegal pushbacks, a damning anti-fraud report and an executive director who had already resigned. The Union runs a border agency it will not vouch for, guarding a frontier it will not defend, and the lesson it drew was to give it more money.
4. Open borders meet reality on the Western Balkan route
Frontex recorded roughly 42,000 irregular crossings in October, 71 per cent up on the year before, with the Western Balkan route alone nearly tripling to 22,300. After a decade of summits and solidarity, the Union's external border remains a suggestion, and the people most keen on keeping it open are the ones who never have to live behind it.
5. The Digital Markets Act lands in the statute book
On 12 October the DMA was published in the Official Journal, ready to enter into force on 1 November and let Brussels micromanage how a handful of mostly American firms build their products. The Union cannot run its own border or its own energy market, but it is quite sure it can design your app store better than the people who wrote it.
6. Joint gas buying, or how to centralise a shortage
At the European Council of 20 and 21 October leaders endorsed voluntary joint gas purchasing, a dose of binding demand aggregation and yet another dynamic price cap. Twenty-seven governments that spent the year undercutting each other for cargoes were now to be coordinated by the institution that had spent a decade telling them to depend on Russian pipelines.
7. The schoolmaster prepares to dock Hungary's pocket money
Through October the Commission held to its plan to freeze 7.5 billion euros of cohesion funds from Hungary, grading a member state's reforms and threatening its allowance from Brussels. Whatever one makes of Budapest, treating sovereign governments like sixth-formers awaiting marks is the centralising instinct in its purest form.
8. A Single Market Emergency Instrument with emergency-sized powers
The Commission's SMEI proposal, tabled in September and grinding through consultation in October, would let Brussels demand information from companies, order member states to stockpile and, in "emergency mode", repurpose private production. An instrument sold as protecting free movement reserves to the Commission the right to direct who makes what, which is the opposite of a free market.
9. The ECB doubles its rate and changes the rules for banks
On 27 October the ECB raised rates by 75 basis points for the third time, lifting the deposit rate to 1.5 per cent, and rewrote the terms of its cheap loans to banks midway through. Having flooded the continent with free money for years, Frankfurt now bills the households for the inflation it helped to brew, with nobody held to account for either half of the experiment.
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