Today, as a result of negotiations with EU finance ministers
over the UK’s additional contribution to the EU budget following upward
revisions to UK GDP, George Osborne said:
“Today I can say this: instead of footing the bill, we have
halved the bill, we have delayed the bill, we will pay no interest on the
bill.”
This would have been quite a result, given that any reduction
in the UK’s contribution would have meant some other EU countries getting less
than they expected. All the more remarkable given that the Financial Times reports
that:
“Officials involved in the closed-door negotiations between
finance ministers said Mr Osborne did not complain about the overall bill.
Instead, the debate focused on delaying the payment, which will allow the
British government to pay after the general election in May.”
So was “halving the bill” a last minute
gift from other EU finance ministers? Had the Commission gifted the UK some
money without telling anyone else what it intended to do? Neither, of course.
The Chancellor had made that bit up. He had simply subtracted the UK rebate,
which the UK was going to get anyway. Treasury officials tried to suggest that
this rebate had been in doubt before separate talks with the Commission, but
the FT reports Commission officials as saying that the rebate was never, ever
in doubt.
So while the rest of the world reported that the UK had failed to get its
additional contribution cut, the UK media dutifully repeated the Chancellor’s
claim that it had been halved. BBC journalists were clearly suspicious about
what had gone on, so their website
led with “Osborne's EU budget claim challenged”. But they couldn’t bring
themselves to actually report that Osborne’s claim to have negotiated a halving
of our additional contribution was wrong. After all, he is the UK Chancellor,
so surely he wouldn’t pretend he had done something he had not. Some lowly MP
might play fast and loose with numbers, but not the man in charge of the UK’s
finances. I suspect many in the media have still not fully appreciated what a
unique Chancellor George Osborne is.
When the UK’s leading supermarket
chain, Tesco, discovered
that they may have overstated their profits by mistiming some payments, four
senior executives, including its UK managing director, were suspended while the
matter was investigated. "Disappointment would be an understatement,"
said Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis. So will the UK’s chief executive, David
Cameron, be reprimanding the Chancellor over his false claims? No, because
given the stress that Cameron put on reducing the total additional contribution
just before the negotiations, it is clear he was in on the deceit. Unlike
Tesco, they think this kind of deception is just part and parcel of their business, and of course they also think that they can get away with it.
