A monthly, sceptical look at what the European Union got up to last month. The promised paradise that never quite arrives, told one directive, regulation, and ruling at a time.
The month Brussels declared gas and nuclear to be green, ordered firms to police their entire supply chains, promised forty-three billion euros for chips and a hundred and fifty for Africa, and was told by its own court that it may dock the pocket money of disobedient members.
The month Brussels declared nuclear and gas green at ten in the evening on New Year's Eve, ruled a website counter illegal, voted to police everyone's advertising, and crowned a new President while the eastern border filled up.
The month Brussels labelled gas and nuclear green over the Christmas holidays so nobody could object, drafted an EU-wide tax, and handed out a medal to itself for caring.
The month Brussels docked a million euros a day from a member state, upheld a billion-euro penalty on a search engine, and watched its open border get prised open by a dictator with a stack of tourist visas.
October 2021 was the month Brussels invoiced a member state a million euros a day for the crime of having its own constitutional court, while the Parliament deplored, the Commission sermonised and the gas bills soared.
Brussels spent September deciding which hole your phone charges through, building a new health super-agency, borrowing billions, and being blindsided by its own allies. More Europe, as ever, was the answer to everything.
The month Brussels quietly switched on the legal machinery for scanning your private messages, refused to pay for a border fence, and lectured Afghans to please stay where they were.
The month Brussels unveiled its largest ever legislative bonfire, invented a brand new tax on imports, ordered private messages scanned, and capped the cash in your pocket at ten thousand euros.
The month Brussels handed every citizen a scannable health pass, drew up a digital identity wallet, started borrowing in its own name and declared abortion a European right, all while failing to keep a single migrant off the Belarusian buses.
The month Brussels threw itself a party about its own future, drew up plans for a single corporate tax rulebook, and demanded the right to inspect newly free Britain's homework on data.
April brought a plan to regulate every algorithm in Europe, a fresh charge sheet for Apple, a passport you need to leave your own region, and a President left on a sofa. Brussels was busy.
The month Brussels invented a papers-please app for the continent, threatened to seize vaccines it was barely using, and declared the whole bloc a freedom zone while suing one of its own members.
The month Brussels tried to retain everyone's metadata, got its foreign chief thrown out of Moscow, and waved through three quarters of a trillion euros of borrowed money it has no idea how to pay back.
The month Brussels botched the vaccines, threatened a hard border it had spent four years lecturing Britain to avoid, and then put the unredacted contract online by leaving the bookmarks in.
The month Brussels invented two new ways to police the internet, bought itself fresh taxes, paid Hungary and Poland to drop a veto, and watched Britain walk out the door with a trade deal in hand.
The month Brussels appointed itself headmaster of the rule of law, drew up plans to peek inside your encrypted messages, and toasted the deal with friends to a hundred cheeses protected in China.
A month in which Brussels graded the planet on carbon, set everyone a wage, billed the continent for a new tax, and discovered that selling passports was a problem only once it was someone else doing the selling.
The month Brussels unveiled a migration pact built on borrowed solidarity, lectured its own members on the rule of law, dragged Apple back to court, and quietly switched on a hundred billion euros of joint debt.
The month Brussels invented its own EUR 81 billion debt, watched a dictator steal an election on its doorstep, lost a commissioner to a golf dinner and quietly admitted that tariffs it built itself were a bad idea.
The month Brussels borrowed three quarters of a trillion euros it does not have, invented a tax on bin bags to pay for it, and quietly asked tech firms to read your private messages while they were at it.
The month Brussels sued Germany for letting its own judges read the law, opened three antitrust probes into one American phone, and went shopping for the right to tax you directly.
The month the EU discovered the magic money tree, decided it answers to nobody, and celebrated seventy years of itself while the lockdown raged on.
The month Brussels punished three nations for refusing migrant quotas, invented a hundred-billion-euro loan scheme, apologised to Italy for being useless, and softened a China report at China's request.
The month the single market discovered it had borders after all, the central bank told Italy it was on its own, and the open frontier was rebranded a shield.
The month Brussels gathered every leader in one room, spent two days arguing about money, and produced nothing but a press conference and a bigger spending plan.