Eurobloat #0158 • June 2023
June was a busy month for an institution that insists it only ever wants to do less. It proposed a new currency, a new tax, a new way to read your messages, and a new bribe for a regime in Tunis, all while assuring everyone it was simplifying.
Folly of the Month: The Commission designs money you do not need
On 28 June the Commission unveiled its "single currency package", a legislative framework for a digital euro that the European Central Bank could, one day, choose to issue. The selling point is that you will be able to pay digitally with a "secure and resilient form of public money", which is a curious thing to promise about a continent that already has cash, cards, and a functioning private payments market. A central bank that can see every transaction, programme every wallet, and switch off the cash it claims to be protecting is not a convenience, it is an architecture. The Commission swears it is all about choice, which is why it needed a regulation to mandate it.
1. The EU asks member states for taxes of its very own
On 20 June the Commission produced an "adjusted" package of new own resources, helpfully meaning fresh revenue streams flowing straight to Brussels rather than to national treasuries. Carbon border levies, emissions auction takings, and a charge on corporate profits would hand the EU budget up to 36 billion euros a year, none of it voted by anyone you elected to your own parliament.
2. Google charged with the offence of being good at advertising
On 14 June the Commission sent Google a Statement of Objections over its adtech business and floated the remarkable remedy of forcing the company to sell off part of itself. Brussels has decided that the cure for one firm doing online advertising too efficiently is to have unelected officials redraw the map of an entire industry from a press conference.
3. Parliament votes to regulate a technology it does not understand
On 14 June MEPs adopted their negotiating position on the AI Act by 499 votes to 28, congratulating themselves on writing "the world's first" rules for artificial intelligence. Being first to regulate something you cannot build is less an achievement than a confession, and the foundation-model registry they bolted on will mostly teach Europe's best engineers the route to San Francisco.
4. Chat Control keeps shuffling towards your inbox
June saw the Commission's "Chat Control" proposal grind onward, the scheme that would have messaging services scan your private conversations for banned material before encryption even applies. Brussels insists it is protecting children, which is the standard wrapper for any plan to read everyone's post, and its own lawyers have warned the thing may not survive contact with the Charter it claims to uphold.
5. The EU buys a coastguard because it will not man its own border
On 11 June von der Leyen flew to Tunis with a Joint Declaration and a chequebook, dangling 100 million euros for border management and a billion more in assorted support so that Tunisia would stop the boats the EU cannot stop itself. Having spent two decades sneering at anyone who wanted to control a border, Brussels now outsources exactly that to a regime documented abusing the very migrants it is being paid to detain.
6. Pay 20,000 euros a head, or take the migrants
On 8 June the Council agreed its position on the asylum pact, complete with a "mandatory solidarity mechanism" under which a member state that declines to host migrants must instead pay 20,000 euros for each one refused. Hungary and Poland voted against being fined for governing their own frontiers, and were duly outvoted, which is Brussels solidarity in its purest form: do as you are told or pay the toll.
→ ecre.org
7. Police in one country can now reach into your data in another
On 27 June the EU finalised its e-Evidence package, letting law enforcement in one member state demand private data held in another within ten days, or eight hours in a hurry, with no government in the middle. The mutual-legal-assistance safeguards that used to take months were not reformed so much as abolished, and the citizen whose data is hoovered up rarely gets a say.
8. Even Parliament's own committee gagged on the Nature Restoration Law
On 27 June the Environment Committee failed to back the Commission's Nature Restoration Law, the vote splitting 44 to 44 because lawmakers feared it would cut food production and raise prices. When a flagship Green Deal law cannot clear the very committee that should love it, the problem is not stubborn farmers, it is a Commission legislating first and counting the cost of harvests never.
9. A new gadget for picking trade fights
On 6 June Parliament and Council struck their deal on the Anti-Coercion Instrument, a fresh "last resort" weapon letting the EU retaliate against foreign countries with trade, investment, and funding restrictions. Naturally it lives in Brussels rather than in any national capital, because nothing says sovereign Europe like handing the Commission a new button marked retaliate and trusting it never to press it for fun.
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