Eurobloat #0151 • November 2022
November was the month the Union remembered that the surest way to fix a budget hole is to give yourself the power to tax. Everything else, from quotas to caps that cannot trigger, was just the warm-up act.
Folly of the Month: The EU votes itself three new taxes
On 23 November the European Parliament endorsed a package of new own resources, the polite Brussels phrase for taxes that flow straight to the centre rather than to the capitals that raise them. The menu is a share of emissions trading revenue, a cut of the new carbon border levy, and a slice of the corporate profits of large multinationals, together worth up to 17 billion euros a year. The official reason is to repay the debt run up by the NextGenerationEU borrowing spree, which is a tidy summary of how Brussels works: borrow first, then discover it needs a permanent revenue stream, then ask member states to hand one over. Power was always supposed to flow up to Brussels only by consent, but a tax is the most permanent form of consent there is.
1. The Digital Markets Act comes into force
On 1 November the Digital Markets Act entered into force, a sprawling rulebook drafted in Brussels to instruct a handful of mostly American firms on how to run their own products. The designation of gatekeepers was deferred until 2023, so the only thing that actually arrived this month was the law itself and the lawyers it will keep employed for the rest of the decade.
2. A gas price cap set too high to ever work
On 22 November the Commission proposed a market correction mechanism that would cap gas prices only once they exceeded 275 euros per megawatt hour for two weeks. Member states pointed out, with some irritation, that the price had not reached that level even during the worst spikes of the summer, meaning the much trumpeted cap was a cap on nothing at all.
3. A 40 percent boardroom quota, ten years in the making
On 22 November Parliament gave final approval to the directive ordering listed companies to fill 40 percent of non-executive board seats with the underrepresented sex by 2026. It took Brussels ten years to agree that the right number of directors is a number set in Brussels rather than by the companies, their owners, or the member states that already legislate on the matter.
4. The Court strikes down the EU's own register
On 22 November the Court of Justice ruled that the anti-money-laundering directive's rule throwing open beneficial ownership registers to the general public was a serious and disproportionate interference with privacy, and therefore invalid. It is a strange spectacle when the Union's own court has to remind the Union that not every database needs to be public, but here we are: Brussels built the overreach, and Luxembourg had to switch it off.
5. The packaging rulebook arrives
On 30 November the Commission tabled its Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, a proposal that reaches all the way down to how often your coffee cup must be refilled and which beverage containers must carry a deposit. Few documents capture the modern Union so well as one that treats the design of a takeaway lid as a matter requiring continental legislation.
6. One rescue ship, two furious capitals
In early November Italy refused the Ocean Viking, France grudgingly took its 234 passengers, then suspended a deal to receive 3,500 migrants from Italy and tightened its Alpine border. After decades of lecturing everyone else about solidarity, the Union could not work out what to do with a single vessel without two of its founding members publicly trading the words selfish and incomprehensible.
7. A resolution that declares but does not do
On 23 November Parliament voted to recognise Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, while conceding in the same breath that the Union has no legal framework that would actually attach any consequence to the label. It was a vote to issue a press release, which remains one of Strasbourg's most reliable products.
8. A climate fund offered with strings at COP27
At the Sharm el-Sheikh summit in mid-November the EU's climate chief Frans Timmermans unveiled a loss and damage fund as a late concession, conditional on others phasing down fossil fuels and on a broad donor base that would oblige China to help pay. The Union arrived promising someone else's money on the condition that someone else agreed to its terms, and called this leadership.
9. Emergency rules to undo the rules
On 9 November the Commission proposed an emergency regulation to fast-track permits for solar panels and heat pumps, having decided that its own permitting maze was now a national security problem. The simplification is welcome, but it took an energy crisis to admit that the obstacle slowing renewable energy across Europe was the paperwork Brussels had spent years piling up.
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