“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” (Joseph Goebbels)
Has David Cameron been taking lessons from Nick Clegg? With Cleggie, it’s the “three million jobs depend on our EU membership” myth that he recycles over and over again in the vain hope that if he repeats himself enough times, people will start to believe him. With the Prime Minister, it’s “I’ve cut the EU budget.” Once again, this is a complete myth. As we reported a while ago (https://campaignforanindependentbritain.org.uk/cut-eu-budget-pull-one-dave-part-2/), the Office of National Statistics’ “Pink Book” shows that both our gross and net contributions have increased substantially since the Coalition government came to power in 2010.
However, the story doesn’t end there. A press release from the European Parliament (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/20141208IPR83032/html/Parliament-and-Council-negotiators-agree-to-EU-budget-deal) states that the EU’s budget will increase by 4.2% next year on top of the figure originally agreed, with the UK being liable for an extra £420 million. Furthermore, the European Parliament also agreed a €4.8bn retroactive top-up for this year. Tuesday’s edition of the Sun http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/politics/6165385/Britain-faces-500m-bill-from-Brussels.html quotes Pawel Swidlicki of Open Europe, who said that this latest inflation busting increase “shows why it is so important for David Cameron to push through radical changes to the way the EU spends taxpayers’ cash.” Does anyone really believe that David Cameron, who is still hardly flavour of the month in most European capitals, is going to be able to change the mindset of an organisation whose auditors have not been willing that to sign off its accounts for the last 19 years? Given Cameron’s belief that he has cut the EU budget when he has done nothing of the sort, Open Europe is pinning its faith in a broken reed.
It is hardly surprising that only two days after the latest EU tax bombshell, an opinion poll conducted by Survation on behalf of The Freedom Association revealed that in the event of an in/out referendum, 46.6 per cent of those surveyed would vote “out” while just 34.3 per cent would vote “in”, with 19.1 per cent undecided. Among those likely to vote, the gap was starker, with 48.8 per cent opting to leave, compared to 34.7 per cent wanting to stay and 16.5 per cent undecided. The Freedom Asssociation’s Rory Broomfield said that “the British people are clearly fed up with picking up bills for EU institutions that remain unaccountable to them and do not act in their best interests.” Absolutely. The EU has already wasted enough of our money and given the failure of George Osborne to reduce the Government’s deficit, we shouldn’t be wasting pouring any more taxpayers’ cash down the bottomless black hole in Brussels.
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