The EU is currently negotiating its ‘Multiannual Financial Framework’ or MFF – the bloc’s long-term spending plan. Member states pay in, the EU splurges the cash, the cycle begins again…
Incoming PM Andy Burnham let the mask slip when he was recorded saying he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU. He walked that back, but only once he’d been caught out and his comments blew up…
Under the current MFF proposals, if the UK were to rejoin, it would have to restart contributions to the EU budget. Brexit stopped those contributions….
The MFF for 2028-2034 will land at somewhere around a staggering 2 trillion Euros. Using the EU’s own MFF formula, given reasonable estimates, this would leave the UK contribution at around £37 billion in 2025 prices. If you make a liberal estimate of what the UK would ‘get back’ through EU spending programmes here, that results in a net annual contribution of £960 per household, £535 per resident or £720 per income taxpayer. Put it another way, that’s roughly 70% of the MoD’s day-to-day budget, or a quarter of the UK’s net debt interest. This would make the UK’s payments something like £500 million a week, so the Brexit bus was right, and would in fact be an underestimate this time around…
If Guido adds this to his previous estimate of Burnham’s bill – the uncosted spending proposals put forward by the incoming Labour team – it puts his tally at approaching £300 billion. What planet is Burnham living on?
Statement by Paul Dacre, Editor-in-Chief of Associated Newspapers Limited, following Harry’s loss in court today:
“Prince Harry wrote a sad book which boasted about his killing of 25 Taliban, his drug-taking and, in cringe-making detail, how he lost his virginity. There isn’t a laundry in the cosmos big enough to wash all the dirty linen he has aired about his own family. For him, to complain about HIS privacy being invaded takes, not just the biscuit, but the whole tin. Poor Harry. I feel sorry for the way a confused and angry young man has been drawn into this case. The bitter irony is that his mother, Diana, liked the Mail. We were her paper. We took her side in her acrimonious break up with Charles. She and I would speak and meet. The Mail’s superb royal reporter was her friend and confidante. The truth is that this trumped-up action – which has cost well over £50 million and wasted a huge amount of valuable court time – should never have been brought to trial. That it did, raises profoundly disturbing questions about the conduct of elements of the legal profession. Today’s verdict is not just a victory for Associated’s magnificent journalists – several of whom have had a terrible toll imposed on their health and lives – but a free press generally. Make no mistake. This was a conspiracy, supported by Hacked Off, to destroy a paper. Financed by the orgy-loving, racist Max Mosley and involving the actor Hugh Grant, it was also a sinister bid to resuscitate Leveson Two and impose statutory regulation on the press which, even now, is rearing its ugly head in Labour’s Media Green Paper.”