Here I am after a long gap (spent trying to earn some money) back at Telegraph Blogs, offering my thoughts on the various EU Budget rows now unfolding:
The EU has annual budget rows. But the big row comes around every seven years, when the so-called Financial Framework for the coming seven-year period falls be negotiated. The next financial framework period is from 2014 to 2020. The figures agreed for that period set ceilings on what might be spent in forthcoming annual budgets. The UK like every other member state has a veto on these large Financial Framework decisions. Annual budgets are decided by EU-style majority voting.
Thus the current excitement. Two important, separate but related negotiations are going on at the same time. One is for the annual spending in 2013 under the current Framework. The other is for the 2014-2020 Framework as a whole...
... London and a group of other capitals have stood firm and deployed a solid blocking minority to stop the increases in the 2013 budget as proposed by the Commission and European Parliament. The European Parliament flounced out of the meeting and was last seen lying on an expensive divan calling weakly for more smelling salts.
When these EU budgets are agreed (or not) everyone naturally focuses on the headline figures, and tries to claim victory or apportion blame accordingly. But this is only part of the story. The tough stand taken by the key contributors on the 2013 budget is in fact a major achievement, as it comes after several years of new discipline that is bringing home the overall spend well beneath the projected Framework ceiling: up to €60 billion that the EU might have spent between 2007-2013 in fact will not have been spent, representing a substantial saving to the largest budgetary net contributors such as the UK.
This helps explain why it is not in the interests of large net funding recipients (such as Poland) for the matter to drag on without agreement. Holding out for a larger budget overall may lead to a worse outcome: it's no good having the hope of more money if realistically that money can't be allocated and spent in the time available...
Which, perhaps, explains this remarkable statement by Radek Sikorski, Poland's Foreign Minister:
Speaking on the Hardtalk TV programme, he said Poland agreed that EU spending levels should be frozen - but based on the 2013 figure plus inflation, not based on the 2011 budget figure. "Britain's position is different, I'm afraid. It wants to take as the base a single annual budget, and an artificially low one - 2011 - and not even the budget, but the actual expenditure, and the budget was underspent. That amounts to a very drastic cut of 200bn [euros]. This is why Britain is so different from the position of the Commission and all the other states," he said.
Now THAT's progress. When everyone is arguing not for huge increases but rather about what baseline is used to measure what a 'freeze' actually is.
Although, of course, if you define a freeze cunningly enough you may get some large increases anyway haha. Luckily we are alert to that. I hope.
The key thing in any negotiation is to shift the discussion on to the intellectual terrain that suits you. And so far London, supported more or less openly by various other capitals, is doing just that. As expected. After all, it's our money that goes a long way to make up the pot drawn down by others.
