This week the UK is expected to be outvoted at a meeting of Europe ministers on the size of the EU’s next budget.
While households across the country are having to make cutbacks, and the British economy sinking further into recession, taxpayers will be forced to fund a 2.8 per cent increase in the EU’s budget – £350 million more than we currently send to Brussels. This will increase the EU’s budget to £108.7 billion a year, £13.5 billion of which is stumped up by British taxpayers. Incredibly, the European Commission isn’t happy with this and actually wants 6.8 per cent.
Britain’s current relationship with the EU is no longer in our national interest. Trade no longer has the same synonymy with our membership that it once did. As Liam Fox outlined in his speech for the TPA earlier this month, we now sell less to the EU than to the rest of the world. A recent study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) confirms this, showing that the big growth areas for British exports in the next 5 years are expected to be Asia, Latin America and Africa, not Europe.
What’s more, the European Commission is fleeecing taxpayers for even more money while hypocritically drawing up plans for how its member states should be cutting their own spending. Many of the EU’s largest economies are sinking in debt and any increase in the EU’s budget shows how out of touch Eurocrats are with economic reality. British taxpayers are the second biggest net contributor to the EU after Germany. They deserve a better deal.