Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-12-14-Speech-3-028"
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"en.20051214.6.3-028"2
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". – Mr President, if you sat down and deliberately tried to plan the family Christmas from hell, you could not do a better job than the British Presidency has managed to achieve in the last six months. I am certain, Mr Alexander, that you have been very ably backed up by the utterly useless and treacherous Foreign Office sitting behind you, but perhaps this morning you as a great Europhile will begin to understand the reality about the UK’s position inside the European Union.
We have never been more isolated, more alienated, more disliked by our European neighbours in our entire history than we are today, sitting here in this Chamber this morning – and I guess that is why Mr Blair has sent you here today to do his dirty work. Because he promised us back in June – did he not? – that he would report back to the European Parliament as often as he could. Well he has not got the guts to turn up today. Perhaps it is the abuse, I do not know. Perhaps he is upset that Mr Barroso has likened him to the Sheriff of Nottingham. I know that many of the new Member States think that Mr Blair is behaving like Ebenezer Scrooge. Well, that is actually rather unfair because the British are still paying GBP 30 million a day into an organisation whose accounts have not been signed off for the last 11 years in a row, and we are paying our fair share of the new underground system in Warsaw, and the sewers in Budapest, and goodness knows how many hectares of French farmland.
But the ghost of Christmas past for Mr Blair will be the spectre of failure. He will not want history to see him coming out of a six-month Presidency without a deal and that is why there will be a deal. There will be a further surrender of the British rebate. And the only real victor in all of this is Mr Barroso! And my goodness me, Mr Barroso, you could do with a few successes, could you not? You wrote to Mr Blair on 20 October with five proposals to relaunch negotiations, and the British Presidency has followed those to the letter, including accepting that in 2008 there will be a complete review of the EU budget, when the whole of the UK rebate will be on the table. So there will be a deal over the next couple of days, but it will not settle the matter.
I have a positive proposal for all of you.
Yes, honestly! Why do we not extend the British Presidency for a further six months? Six more months of the Foreign Office, Mr Blair and Mr Alexander, six more months of this, and it will be obvious to all that the United Kingdom is a square peg in a round European hole. A global trading nation that is very proud of its recent history does not belong, does not fit in with this club and, from your perspective, we are like the dog in the manger, are we not? We are always holding you up. We are always stopping you. Get rid of us! Kick us out! Expel us! You can then carry on with your projects and we can get back to running our own country. It is not just a question of ‘we want our money back’ – we want our country back!"@en1
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"(Interjection from the floor: ‘No!’)"1
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