eurealist.co.uk

The Telegraph hits the jackpot with EUsceptic comment this Easter Monday, with this article
below Daniel Hannan`s comment that you might as well vote for Duck a for all the diference it makes and David Rennie report on Blairs dishonesty over the EU Budget

Impoverished by the EU
(Filed: 17/04/2006)

A billion here, a billion there: pretty soon it starts to add up to real money. As David Rennie reports today, the final bill to British taxpayers for Tony Blair’s cave-in on the EU budget is about £20 billion more than was announced at the time. This is a truly stupefying sum. The idea has somehow got round that our contributions to the EU budget are trivial when set against the advantages of increased market access. But it is worth setting the figures in context.

The additional amount conceded by Mr Blair last December, £7 billion, is equivalent to the total police budget for England and Wales. The United Kingdom’s annual gross contribution to Brussels, £12 billion, is equivalent to the combined revenue raised by inheritance tax, capital gains tax and stamp duty. We are, in short, paying in an awesome amount of money.

And what are we getting in return? Our Parliament is hobbled, our countryside ruined, our fishing grounds plundered, our businesses asphyxiated with regulation. Even in his own terms, as a pro-European, what did Mr Blair get in return for handing away our taxes? Did the French agree to reform the Common Agricultural Policy? Did the net recipient countries express their gratitude to Britain? Of course not.

We made some disobliging remarks about the Prime Minister’s negotiating skills at the time, but don’t take our word for it. Listen to how he was received in Europe. Le Parisien declared that “Chirac won the match against Tony Blair on the British rebate”. Welt am Sonntag commented: “Tony Blair began the EU presidency as a tiger and ended it as a doormat”.

Of course, for Mr Blair, the figures are irrelevant. For him, Europe has always been more about demonstrating his internationalist credentials than about securing specific objectives for Britain. The idea of a cost-benefit analysis of EU membership strikes him as absurd, which is why he refuses to commission one.

Yet it is worth reminding ourselves, once again, of quite how much we are paying. At the last election, Mr Blair excoriated the Conservatives because of their modest plans to trim £4 billion a year from the tax bill. At the same time, he breezily expects us to pay three times this amount to Brussels every year. He cannot have it both ways. The next time he sneeringly asks the Tories how they plan to finance their tax cuts, they should reply, politely, “from the EU budget”.