Why Europe deserves a better budget:
Robbing the EU poor to please the rich by Trevor Royle
How would you vote in the great EU budget which will decide Europe’s fiscal policy for 2007-2013? Are you on the side of regional policy commissioner Danuta Hübner, who wants to produce an equable distribution of funds across the 25 members so that everyone benefits? Or are you more convinced by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s contention that the time has come to limit the available funds to the poorest members by the extraordinarily simple method of “cutting the financial outflow” from those with most to spare?
It sounds simple, and to a certain extent it is. Instead of adopting the economic concept which allowed Robin Hood to put an acceptable gloss on his wrong-doing, the exact opposite happens: rather than taking from the rich to help the poor, the rich get to keep their dosh and the poor get poorer.That is the conundrum facing the EU this week as Britain enters the last few days of what has been a thoroughly unexceptional presidency. At stake is the divvying-up of the European Union budget, an issue so laden with difficulties that attempts at finding a solution always end in tears.
Take Spain. From any historical perspective, this country should be one of Europe’s super-powers, but the years of the Franco dictatorship left her in the wake of her closest neighbours, with the result that Madrid is a major recipient of EU development funds. If these are siphoned off to the poorer members , Spain will lose around €1 billion. Compared with the €836bn which is Britain’s latest target in a revised budget, Spain’s disputed losses seem measly, but let’s look again at those figures. Back in the summer, the EU agreed that €871bn was an achievable objective. Now that it has been slashed, there can only be one winner – if Britain gets her way, there will be a pro-rata reduction in her annual contribution from €70bn to €58bn. Small wonder that Spain’s economic minister greeted the new proposals with the thought that Blair’s proposal was “a magnificent document … for British interests”.
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