Some myths need to be cleared up about the reported £61 billion “divorce bill” that Brussels hopes to force Britain to pay before its departure. This is not simply political posturing on behalf of the sclerotic EU: it is a very weak opening negotiating move. Whenever the other side opens with a “this is going to hurt” punitive demand for a hugely inflated settlement, lawyers know that the real figure is going to be a great deal less.
Especially when you are dealing with an organisation as corrupt and as unwilling to be forensically investigated as the EU itself. Some reports have suggested that Theresa May will settle with the EU for a fraction of the amount demanded. Maybe for less than £4 billion – about half the annual contribution that Britain currently pays to the EU.
The reason I am confident that the divorce bill will turn out to be more costly and painful for the EU than the UK is that, as with any divorce, the real cost can only be calculated once both sides have seen the all-important financial disclosures. The think tank Civitas says that a hard-hitting series of financial claims against the EU for misappropriation of British funds would soon get the EU to back down from asking for any money at all. It reckons that Brussels owes the UK up to a trillion euros in compensation.
That nothing is owed at all was indeed the conclusion of a House of Lords report into Brexit, just as you don’t owe anything other than your last bar bill if you resign from a club.
A proper British media and legal investigation into the EU’s misuse of UK funds could make the Westminster MPs’ expenses scandal look tame. We already have the best investigative journalists in the world, and the best forensic lawyers trained to probe accounts.
The reason that the EU’s accounts have not been signed off for years is that they are a pit of financial incompetence. The Prime Minister should seize on this to make a series of counter-claims. Whenever I’ve been to Brussels, I’ve been struck by the waste and extravagance. Take the wine list in the swankiest restaurant. I was recently having lunch with William Dartmouth MEP and he showed me how the list – including the very best French wines – was so heavily subsidised that the most expensive bottle was actually a British wine at €49.
A probe into EU corruption and excess could be our media’s finest hour. Mrs May should also recruit her best former EU diplomats and officials – asking them to spill the beans on all the malfeasance they have witnessed (and hidden under the carpet). As in any messy divorce, information – not threats or overblown settlement claims – is power.
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When I was growing up in a political family in the 1980s one of my rather unlikely heroes was the German academic and liberal social philosopher Ralf Dahrendorf.
Dahrendorf’s book, On Britain, examining the country’s decline, was also a BBC television series. What few viewers knew was that, before becoming director of the London School of Economics, he had briefly been a controversial German EEC commissioner.
He arrived in Brussels as a liberal who regarded the institution as a sacrosanct guardian of fair play, human rights and liberty. Within 12 months, he was so appalled at the undemocratic political project that, in 1971, he wrote a series of pseudonymous articles for Die Zeit exposing the workings of the European Commission. This was one reason he ended up at the LSE – he needed a new job abroad after making himself un-popular as an “intellectual traitor” in Germany.
Back in the 1970s, he did the unthinkable: expose the EU as a self-interested Franco-German racket that was never really interested in serving the UK’s interests. Dahrendorf had witnessed Britain’s efforts to try to get a seat at the table of the EEC after being blackballed by Charles de Gaulle in the late 1960s.
“I wanted Britain in Europe,” he wrote. “At the same time, I had already come to the conclusion that there was a worrying discrepancy between the needs of Europe and the reality of the European Communities. This meant there was a discrepancy also between the political intentions of the British Government and the economic realities of the EEC.”
This diagnosis was before we even joined in 1975. As a political exile from Germany, Dahrendorf understood why Britain and Europe’s federalist project were always going to be at loggerheads.
Dahrendorf became a member of the House of Lords and warden of an Oxford College. He died in 2009, still a believer in European integration. But, by sowing some of the original seeds of doubt about the intellectual honesty of Brussels as far back as the early 1970s, he helped prepare the ground for Brexit.
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