UK urged to give up rebate
By Honor Mahony
The European budget commissioner has urged the UK to give up its annual rebate worth around 4.6bn euro.
In an interview in the Times on Friday (14 January), Dalia Grybauskaite said, "If other member states started to negotiate just on physical amounts of money, you are forgetting solidarity, a core policy of the European Union. If you have bad times, you have been helped. If you have good times, you help others".
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The Lithuanian Commissioner said that unless the UK and other big EU countries increased their payments to Brussels over the next seven years, the EU would be unable to provide the skills, technology and infrastructure required to compete in the global market.
Referring specifically to the rebate which the UK negotiated in 1984, Mrs Grybauskaite said:
"It is a sensitive issue, and especially for the other 24 countries. We don’t want anybody to be jeopardised, we don’t want anybody to use it against the European idea, and use it against the constitution — and to become a tool for eurosceptics".
Over the past 20 years, the rebate has brought back €64 billion to Britain, or about €1,000 per citizen.
According to the Times, without the rebate, the UK would have paid 14 times as much as France or Italy to the EU.