Today, Ursula can start spending €200 BILLION (£166bn pounds) of EU taxpayers’ money
Thanks to Brexit, you’re excused from paying - your money is safe from her grasp
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Facts4EU reveals the enormity of the EU bullet we dodged by leaving
For most people it’s the first working day of the New Year. For many this means they may still be nursing hangovers, for others it is the first step on their commitment taken as a New Year Resolution to stop : drinking, smoking, eating fast food, gambling, being rude to their in-laws, being late for work, or a whole variety of other improvements people might wish to make to their lives.
For EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, however, it certainly means one thing : money, and lots of it. Yesterday was the day the new EU budget for 2025 started.
We’ll keep this light – as light as the wallets of EU citizens after they’ve had to pay for this Commission largesse
It’s the first working day after New Year’s Day and we’ll go easy on everyone. We do not intend to dive into all the detail of how the EU budgets work, nor how they are distributed, except in broad-brush explanations.
After all, you may have stayed up late to see in the New Year, you may have had a celebratory tipple or two, and you may have been drowning your sorrows yesterday as you contemplated a return to work today. (Unless you’re a Civil Servant, of course, in which case you’ll probably be “working from home” again….) In any case, we’ve gone into considerable detail about this before, many times.
Today, Ursula von der Leyen has 200 billion reasons to be cheerful
This is the amount in euros (barring some small change) which the EU Council signed off on 25 November following the usual prolonged negotiations they had with the MEPs of the EU Parliament. To give some idea of the length of the process, the EU Council first put forward its opening position on 12 March last year (2024). It would be fair to say that the moment one year's budget is agreed, the minds in Brussels turn to the 9-10 months of negotiations over the next year's budget.
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We don’t know how EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen celebrated yesterday but it’s possible that she might have been with her large family, singing a song or two. Some years ago the Facts4EU.Org team tracked down a video of the young Ursula when she was a member of “The von Albrecht Family Singers’. (Her maiden name is von Albrecht.)
The video below comes from a TV show in Germany on which the family appeared. Since we first tracked it down, an action has been taken to stop us from embedding the video on here. However, we still have the link! You can watch it by clicking the photo which will take you to the video on YouTube. We advise you to watch it now for a bit of fun, before it disappears completely! (Advisory: If you're expecting something like the von Trapp Family Singers from 'The Sound of Music'. you may be in for a disappointment.)
How much would the UK have had to pay, without Brexit?
The percentage of the EU’s budget paid for by the UK was generally quoted by HM Treasury as having been 12.5%. This is what they said we were paying, but over the years we never saw this happen in practice. It was always more. There were many reasons for this, the chief amongst them being the EU’s various ‘off-budget funds’ which the UK paid into but into which most of the countries in the EU did not. HM Treasury never included these in its calculations of the UK's 'contribution'.
Our conservative estimate of a truer figure is 13.5% of the EU budget, which would equate to £22.3bn pounds this year. The figure of £22 billion may of course resonate in readers' minds as being the figure Chancellor Rachel Reeves has repeatedly claimed is the 'black hole' she inherited in the nation's accounts from the Conservative administration. We should add that this doesn’t account for the massive liabilities on top of this for the EU’s special fund dealing with Covid and the energy crisis.
Finally, what will Ursula spend all her money on?
Below is the broad classification of how the €200 billion Euros will be allocated. This is the 2025 budget as agreed between Council and Parliament - in billions of euros. As it’s the start of the New Year, we hope readers will forgive us for our light-hearted translation.
In short, 68% of the EU budget will be spent on keeping the EU together and on its 'Green' agenda.
Observations
Brexit is the gift that keeps on giving. As we enter another new year, it is once again a year in which the UK taxpayer will not be subsidising the rest of the EU - thanks to Brexit. When arch-Remainer Rachel Reeves contemplates the state of the country's accounts today, we hope she will give thanks that she does not immediately have to subtract £22bn from the sums she has to play with. Somehow we doubt it.
When looking at this, we hope that readers will note how the unelected EU Commission is dividing up the 200 billion euros it now has as its disposal. The amount is bad enough, but the ways it will be spent are almost worse.
The first two items account for almost 68% of the total EU budget for this year. One of these is about perpetuating the myth of the EU as a success, giving so much to poorer member states (which means they'll stay). The second is all about the ideologically-driven Net Zero and Green agenda - the No.1 policy priority of the EU Commission.
We rest our case.
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[ Sources: EU Council | EU Commission | EU Parliament ] Politicians and journalists can contact us for details, as ever.
Brexit Facts4EU.Org, Thurs, 02 Jan 2025
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