Eurobloat #0181 • May 2025
May was the month Brussels threw a party to celebrate luring a departed member back towards its orbit, and the headline prize, tellingly, was fish.
Folly of the Month: a "reset" whose great trophy was twelve more years of British fish
On 19 May the EU and the United Kingdom held their first summit since Brexit and hailed a "new chapter". Strip away the warm words and the thing Brussels wanted most, and got, was access to British fishing waters locked in until 2038. An institution that presents twelve more years of someone else's fish as a triumph of statecraft tells you precisely where its priorities lie, and is the best advertisement for leaving that anyone could have written.
→ oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu → euronews.com
1. Rule-taking without a vote
The agri-food side of the deal commits Britain to "dynamic alignment" with EU food rules and the jurisdiction of the EU court, with no say in either. This is the very arrangement Brexit was meant to end: obeying Brussels rules written by people you cannot remove.
2. Re-importing the carbon rulebook
The reset also points towards relinking the UK's emissions trading scheme to the EU's, quietly pulling British carbon policy back under Brussels gravity. The drift is always in one direction, and it is never outward.
3. Youth mobility, or free movement by another name
Both sides agreed to work towards a "youth experience scheme", which is freedom of movement wearing a lanyard and pretending not to be. The label changes; the ambition to erase the border does not.
4. A defence pact to draw Britain back in
The summit produced a UK-EU security and defence partnership, another thread tying the departed member back to the centre. Brussels cannot win the argument, so it settles for slowly reabsorbing the people who left.
5. The carbon border tax, "simplified" and enlarged
In its May plenary the Parliament backed simplifying and strengthening the carbon border tax, which is to say making it both easier to administer and harder to escape. Simplification that expands the reach of a levy is the most Brussels kind of simplification there is.
6. Tariffs on farm goods, paid by your shopping
MEPs approved new tariffs on agricultural goods from Russia and Belarus. The geopolitics may be sound; the bill, as ever with EU trade gestures, lands on the European shopper.
7. Repricing the budget upwards, again
The Parliament adopted a report on revamping the long-term budget around competitiveness, defence and the rest, code for a bigger pot. Whatever the heading, the recommended direction of the EU budget is always up.
8. The plan to break the encryption keeping you safe
On 26 May, eighty-nine organisations, firms and security experts wrote to the Commission warning that its ProtectEU drive to grant "lawful access" to encrypted messages would weaken the very encryption that protects every European. Brussels calls smashing the locks on your private life a security strategy.
9. The reset as patient reconquest
The whole exercise is best understood as Brussels gently winning back ground it lost at the ballot box, one alignment clause at a time. A union confident in its own appeal would not need to reel in the members who voted to leave.
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