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The EU Needs to Get Real About Its Budget

The European Union is proposing an annual budget increase of 5%. Labour MP Kate Hoey says this another reason why the British people should sign up to the People's Pledge and demand a referendum.

By Kate Hoey

1 Jul 2011, 15:01

Late on Wednesday night European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso announced that future EU spending needs a 5 per cent increase over the next seven year budgetary period. The draft budget also included some new ideas to raise money. An EU wide VAT was one such suggestion – so ensuring that as he said the EU has its ‘own resources’, and even less accountable to the people and Governments of the UK and other European countries. The UK rebate was also put forward as something to be re-considered… and all this when the European Court of Auditors has refused to sign off the EU accounts for the sixteenth year in a row!

Next morning on the Today programme Commissioner Viviene Reding spent most of a 3 minute interview trying to deny any increase. Her Euro speak was typical of a highly paid and unelected Brussels bureaucrat.  Commissioners seem to inhabit a totally different world from the rest of us. So intent are they on moving the ‘project’ of a united Europe forward that they are oblivious to the utter contempt that millions of citizens across Europe have for them.

Having been sceptical about the benefits of the EU for many years it has been depressing to see an almost total acquiescence by my own party to whatever the EU has wanted. But the mood is changing. Having reneged on giving the British people a chance to vote on the Lisbon treaty there is growing support for a referendum on whether we really want to stay in the EU or not.  At last the Europhiles are being challenged on the benefits of being in the EU.  Those of us who  campaigned to stay out of the Euro have been proved right and now it can only survive if there is even more unifying economic and political structures. The People’s Pledge campaign is growing with even some committed pro EU MP’s like Keith Vaz recognising the need to give the public a voice and a vote.

This excellent new cross-party organisation represents people of all different parties and shades of political view, but importantly they are all democrats, wanting the public to have a say on our EU membership for the first time in 36 years. After all, someone would have to be in their mid fifties to have ever had a vote on our membership, and so generations have not had been asked this most basic of questions. It is time the people had a say.