Eurobloat #0168 • April 2024
April was the last full plenary before June's elections, so the outgoing class of MEPs cleared its desk by passing nearly everything it had not yet got round to. The result was a single month of migration deals, repair sermons, banned shampoo miniatures and a brand new cap on your own cash.
Folly of the Month: A migration pact that relocates everyone but the problem
On 10 April the Parliament finally adopted the New Pact on Migration and Asylum in a flurry of ten separate votes, the centrepiece of which is a "solidarity mechanism" obliging member states to take in relocated arrivals or pay into a central pot to be excused. After years of failing to control its own external border, Brussels has decided the answer is not fewer arrivals but a fairer way of sharing them out among capitals, several of which have already said they will not comply. The same package authorises taking facial images and fingerprints from children as young as six, which is the sort of detail that tends to get lost behind the word "solidarity". A border the EU cannot defend, dressed up as a quota the EU cannot enforce.
1. The €10,000 cash cap, with a new authority to watch you spend it
On 24 April the Parliament approved the anti-money-laundering package, complete with an EU-wide ceiling on cash payments and a shiny new central agency, AMLA, to be installed in Frankfurt. Nothing says trust in the citizen quite like deciding from Brussels how much of your own money you may hand over in person.
2. The right to repair, now compulsory and lectured
On 23 April MEPs adopted the "right to repair" directive by 584 votes to 3, instructing manufacturers how they must mend your kettle and nudging you to feel virtuous about keeping it. A genuinely useful idea would not need a directive, a digital form and a Brussels press release to tell you that fixing things is good.
3. The packaging regulation comes for your hotel shampoo
On 24 April the Parliament signed off the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, which among much else bans the little shampoo and body-lotion bottles in hotel bathrooms and the single portions of sauce in restaurants. The continent that cannot guard a border has at least settled the great question of the miniature ketchup sachet.
4. Brussels decides who is your boss
Also on 24 April the Parliament backed the Platform Workers Directive, under which an EU-wide "presumption of employment" will reclassify delivery riders and drivers across twenty-seven different labour markets. Quite how a single Brussels rule improves on the national courts that already handle this is left, as ever, to the imagination.
5. The Ecodesign passport for your trousers
The same plenary adopted the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which extends design rules across almost every product and bolts on a mandatory "Digital Product Passport". Soon your shirt will carry more paperwork than a returning Brexit lorry, and Brussels will call this simplification.
6. Your medical records, pooled at the centre
On 24 April MEPs adopted the European Health Data Space by 445 votes to 142, creating a Union-wide system for sharing patient files and, for research, your data whether you asked or not. The body that frets endlessly about Big Tech holding your information has decided the safe place for it is a pan-European database run by itself.
7. Due diligence for the whole planet, billed to your suppliers
On 24 April the Parliament passed the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, 374 to 235, requiring large firms to police human rights and the environment up and down their entire global supply chains. A compliance industry is hereby created by statute, and member states are given two years to work out who pays for it.
8. Central planning, rebranded as a Net-Zero Industry Act
On 25 April MEPs approved the Net-Zero Industry Act, which sets a Brussels target for the share of green technology to be manufactured inside the Union and hands out streamlined permits to the favoured sectors. The last time Europe tried to plan which industries would flourish from the centre, the results were not encouraging.
9. Post-Qatargate, an ethics body with no power to investigate
In the spring the EU institutions finally agreed to set up an "Interinstitutional Body for Ethical Standards", their long-trailed answer to the Qatargate cash-and-corruption scandal. It may draft common standards and politely monitor compliance, but it may not investigate anyone, which is roughly the watchdog you design when you do not want to be watched.
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