Stephen Hill says Britain’s unexpected bill will only move us closer to the exit. Thanks, Francois!
I don’t know if there is such a word as ‘dontopedagogical’ in the OED, but if there isn’t one, then I claim to have invented it here: it means the contortion whereby an idiot puts his foot into his own mouth.
The fatheads who ‘manage’ the EU’s finances could not have handed Nigel Farage a better hand for the Rochester and Strood by-election than their daft demand that the UK pays it ’2 billion by 1 December.
Not only that, but the third biggest EU economy, the UK, must pay this to the first and second largest economies, Germany and France. Even more stupid is that bankrupt Greece and Cyprus must pay as well – but with what? Olives?
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Germany has been the main beneficiary of the one-size-fits-nobody euro, as it has racked up a $100 billion trade surplus on its EU trade, but now finds its customers across Europe have got no dosh to buy from them any more. Why should the UK pay Germany another billion on top of that?
France’s economy is a sluggard and it’s entirely their own fault: France is run by trade unions – les syndicates – and Brussels, while a man sits powerless in the Elys’e Palace shrugging his shoulders, making mistake after economic mistake: lowering the pension age while raising the pensions, for example.
He should be locked up in the Bastille for being such an economic idiot instead. Why should the UK pay for Frenchmen to retire seventeen years before they can retire in the UK?
If a country puts its house in order and does well, then the money belongs to it, not to some other country. Back in the crash of 2008-9, the UK sorted out its own banks with its own money, so not unnaturally its economy now is doing much better. The EU has not done anything about its bust banks – five years late.
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The fact that the EU economy is contracting because of its own eurozone errors does not mean that the UK should pay a single penny to the idiots who have got themselves into such a mess.
It’s not that the UK is doing well – it is still borrowing ’85 billion-plus this year – but that the German and French economies are not doing so well in comparison: how that generates an invoice for ’2 billion beats me: all it shows is that the EU supports failure.
It’s time to renegotiate everything right now – not in Cameron’s 2017 dream machine.
I am writing this in France, a country that is rudderless and going nowhere. There is despondency wherever you look, to whoever you talk to. Slowly, the French are turning, somewhat ashamedly, to Marine Le Pen’s Front National, thinking she has an answer that will work: dump the euro, bring back the franc and devalue by 30 per cent. Voila!
