The European elite has been forcing the Mediterranean into crippling tax increases and impoverishment for the region’s citizens, all to protect the madness that is the single currency. Of course, the elites themselves have no interest in tightening their own belts, as Bruno Waterfield of the Telegraph notes:
British taxpayers will have to fork out an extra £11.5 billion in contributions to fund increases in Brussels budgets after the European Union dismissed a plea from William Hague for spending restraint.
As the Foreign Secretary used a keynote Berlin speech to plead that EU budgets stayed “in touch with the real world”, MEPs and the European Commission agreed a series of demands that will increase EU expenditure by £95 billion over the next eight years.
“People simply do not understand why there should be massive increases in the EU budget when all EU countries are trying to balance the books at home,” he said on Tuesday.
Hague’s boss (Prime Minister David Cameron) has threatened to veto the EU budget if it includes any spending increase above inflation – a threat repeatedly mocked and dismissed by the Eurocrats and their allies.
That was yesertday, however. Today, Waterfield noted another EU member – the europhilic Netherlands, of all places – is also threatening to block the EU budget:
Jan Kees de Jager, the Dutch finance minister, told his country’s parliament that the Netherlands “would dig in its heels” to stop an above-inflation EU budget for 2013 and a demand for an 11 per cent rise in European spending between 2014 to 2020.
“This is unacceptable to us, and we will fight tooth and nail against it,” he said last night. “It is incomprehensible.” Mr De Jager attacked the European Commission and MEPs for demanding an “unbelievable” seven per cent rise in spending next year despite a request from governments that EU expenditure is reduced to reflect painful austerity and reductions in national budgets.
He pledged to join with Britain and other countries to form a “blocking” vote to stop the 2013 increase which increase the Brussels bill for national government by £7.3 billion at a time when the Dutch, a eurozone member, are implementing painful national cuts that have demanded by the EU to tackle the single currency debt crisis.
Looks like Britain isn’t alone in demanding sanity come to the EU budget.
It should be noted that all EU members have to agree to the budget. In theory, Cameron could stop it all by himself. Now, however, he has at least one ally.
Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon
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