Eurobloat #0117 • January 2020
The month Brussels lost a member, mislaid a trillion euros, mused about banning faces and decided what your phone charger should look like, all while insisting it had never been more united.
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Eurobloat
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.
192 posts
Eurobloat #0116 • December 2019
A new Commission moved in, a new continent-sized spending plan was unveiled, and a new ECB chief discovered she was on a bus she could not steer. December 2019: more Europe, just in time for Christmas.
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Eurobloat #0115 • November 2019
The month Brussels crowned a new Commission, declared an emergency it has no power to fix, lectured Warsaw twice from the bench, and decided that government should spend more of your money.
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Eurobloat #0114 • October 2019
The month Brussels blessed Britain's exit, ordered Facebook to police the planet, decreed the correct way to tick a box, and discovered that unanimity is a problem when France actually uses it.
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Eurobloat #0113 • September 2019
The month Brussels decided where the world may read, printed a fresh box of vice-presidents, lectured the continent on history, and broke online shopping in the name of safety.
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Eurobloat #0112 • August 2019
The month a rescue ship sat off Lampedusa for three weeks while Brussels haggled over who would take which migrants, Brexit Britain was told the backstop was non-negotiable, and the EU funded a robot that reads your face for lies.
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Eurobloat #0111 • July 2019
The month the Union handed its five biggest jobs to people nobody voted for, scraped a new Commission President through by nine votes, and fined a chipmaker for charging too little.
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Eurobloat #0110 • June 2019
The month Brussels weaponised stock-market access against the Swiss, lectured Italy on its own budget, struck down a Polish law and a German toll, and banned the plastic straw.
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Eurobloat #0109 • May 2019
May 2019: Luxembourg ordered every employer in Europe to keep a stopwatch, Brussels gathered in Sibiu to admire itself, and the upload filters went into the rulebook while the voters were busy electing more sceptics.
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Eurobloat #0108 • April 2019
The month Brussels signed off upload filters, built a 10,000-strong border army to fix the border it broke, knitted everyone's biometric databases together and lectured the planet on how to be ethical.
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Eurobloat #0107 • March 2019
March was the month Brussels voted to make every website a censor, fined Google another fortune, and promised to abolish the seasons. Britain, sensibly, asked to leave.
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Eurobloat #0106 • February 2019
The month Brussels agreed to install upload filters on the internet, lobbied itself out of naming Saudi Arabia, and handed itself a fish deal in occupied Western Sahara, all while lecturing on the future of Europe.
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Eurobloat #0105 • January 2019
The euro turned twenty, Brussels handed the gavel to the one member state it was busy investigating, and the new privacy regime opened its account by fining Google. A vintage month of grading members the EU would never let grade themselves.
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Eurobloat #0104 • December 2018
December: the Court that grades members on their constitutional homework, a eurozone budget shrunk to a rumour, and a 5 million euro plan to tell you what is true.
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Eurobloat #0103 • November 2018
The month Brussels marked a century of peace by demanding its own army, told Rome how to write a budget, and reached for the upload filters and the cotton buds.
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Eurobloat #0102 • October 2018
The month Brussels sent a sovereign budget back unread, told the kitchen to surrender its plastic straws, and demanded an audit of a private American company, all while the Brexit talks it claimed to want went precisely nowhere.
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Eurobloat #0101 • September 2018
The month Brussels voted to filter the internet, demanded terrorist posts vanish within the hour, put Hungary in detention and announced it would abolish the clocks. The hour of European sovereignty, apparently, belongs to everyone except the nations that make it up.
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Eurobloat #0100 • August 2018
The month Brussels counted soybeans, refereed the clocks of an entire continent and let two ships full of people rot in port while twenty-eight capitals argued about whose problem they were.
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Eurobloat #0099 • July 2018
The month Brussels fined Google more than four billion euros, told farmers their plants were now criminals, and asked 4.6 million people whether to change the clocks before promptly doing nothing about it.
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Eurobloat #0098 • June 2018
The month Brussels voted to filter the internet, taxed plastic to plug the Brexit hole, and stayed up until five in the morning to agree on borders it had no intention of guarding.
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Eurobloat #0097 • May 2018
The month Brussels switched on the continent-wide consent-banner generator, drew up plans to dock the pocket money of misbehaving members, and declared war on the drinking straw.
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Eurobloat #0096 • April 2018
The month Brussels handed its top job to one man in nine minutes flat, appointed itself the continent's fact-checker, and drew up orders to seize your emails across borders without bothering the locals.
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Eurobloat #0095 • March 2018
The month Brussels invented a tax it could not collect, a court that abolished its own members' courts, and a Secretary-General who was promoted twice before lunch.
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Eurobloat #0094 • February 2018
The month a top official was promoted twice in nine minutes, Brussels dreamed up pan-European seats and EU taxes, and Parliament gravely debated whether to keep changing the clocks.
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Eurobloat #0093 • January 2018
The month Brussels noticed a Brexit-shaped hole in its budget and decided the cure was higher contributions and brand-new EU taxes, while also handing Qualcomm a billion-euro bill and convening 39 experts to decide what counts as truth.
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