EU’s demands for UK to pay additional £1.7bn is ‘outrageous’

The EU’s demands for UK taxpayers to cough up an additional £1.7bn is ‘outrageous’ and the leadership of the Conservative Party is in ‘complete disarray’ according to UKIP’s EU budget spokesman, Jonathan Arnott MEP.

EU Chiefs plan to charge an additional £1.7 billion from UK taxpayers on the back of the UK’s better than expected economic performance in recent years.

Meanwhile, Syed Kamall, leader of the Conservatives’ MEPs, admitted this morning that Treasury officials may have known about the EU’s new demands a week ago.

Since then, Cameron told his MEPs to vote in favour of the EU’s new unelected commission, their whips overruled him and said to abstain, whilst still more MEPs voted against.

Arnott said “This farce would be as big a comedy of errors as Ed Miliband’s Party Conference speech if it weren’t so serious. Cameron broke his promise on the Lisbon Treaty, his much-trumpeted ‘budget cut’ was actually just a below-inflation rise, he failed to stop Juncker becoming Commission President and his EU ‘renegotiation’ hasn’t removed a single stroke of a pen from a single EU law. Now hard-pressed British taxpayers are being expected to cough up yet another pile of cash that we can’t afford. Cameron is out-manoeuvred at every stage by the European Union, and it’s our taxes that foot the bill”.

Eurocrats have recalculated national payments to the EU based on economic performance since 1995. Whilst the UK pays money to the EU, Germany and France are due to receive nearly £1.6bn between them.

It would add about a fifth to the UK’s annual net contribution of £8.6bn.

“It’s Alice in Wonderland stuff”, Jonathan Arnott continued. “Our ‘economic recovery’ is invisible in the North, yet we’re supposed to send cash to France. And Greece and Italy, in economic meltdown, are being expected to subsidise Germany. And these figures, backdated to 1995, are based on the EU’s estimate of illegal activities like drug dealing, which never gave the Exchequer a penny piece. The phrase ‘you couldn’t make it up’ has never been more apt.”