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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » This week’s Local By-Election Results: A good day for the Tories
Mevagissey on Cornwall (Lab Defence)
Result: Conservative 348 (32% +8%), UKIP 281 (26% -2%), Labour 204 (19% -11%), Liberal Democrats 197 (18% +4%), Greens 50 (5% -2%)
Conservative GAIN from Labour with a majority of 67 (6%) on a swing of 5% from UKIP to Conservative
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http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/anne-jolis/2014/11/about-that-eu-bill-heres-what-george-osborne-didnt-mention/
"On the phone from Brussels, a commission aid told me that Osborne will
‘pay first and then get the rebate.’
This implies that Osborne will, despite his protestations, pay the full £1.7 billion – albeit with a refund to follow shortly, which Britain was always likely to receive."
I realise that this is of no conceivable relevance, but it's more interesting than my family stories about Rugby.
1) Britain is due a rebate from the EU.
2) A separate bill for £1.7bn arrives
3) The Tories say that they won't pay it all
4) Now they are deducting the value of the rebate from the bill they were getting anyway and trying to pretend they've got a discount.
If so then they are complete idiots. Farage for PM at this rate.
Mad. Completely mad, there is no arguing with this insanity, which goes round in a circle of contradictory positions. The only thing which is consistent is that you are invariably determined to blame Cameron and Osborne somehow.
"British officials argued that it had not been clear whether the UK would qualify for a rebate since Brussels dropped the bombshell bill. But that would have been unique since Britain’s gross contributions to the EU budget have automatically benefitted from the rebate since the 1980s."
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/07/uk-pays-full-eu-rebate-despite-osborne-claim-he-halved-it
1. Cameron shouldn't have spouted off that he'd "never pay" (I paraphrase)
2. Osborne did actually gain a reasonble concession in payment terms
3. He then stupidly claimed a huge victory, purely by shuffling dates
4. He was called out on it PDQ
5. Osborne and Cameron look shifty. Every other party piles on.
6. Every man and his dog now accepts the rebate was coming our way anyway, and only a small part of it is related to the extra payment due.
It was the mismatch between 2 and 3, combined with the atmosphere of expectation created by 1 that has led to point 5. It's a classic Tory-EU clusterfuck, and it wont be the last. I despair.
It won;t win the tories back any UKIP votes, and may drive yet more away.
The aftertiming is what makes the haters look ridiculous.
What hope is there when people ignore facts which are trivially easy to check?
Cameron got nothing. The bill is delayed to allow the French not to be fined again by the EU next year and as others have noted these payments have always been subject to the UK's discount. The whole thing stinks of stage management.
More interestingly, is there a market on Juncker getting the boot given the news about the tax arrangements he made for large companies in Lux, giving them secret letters etc?
Clinton 47
Kasich 43
Clinton 46
Christie 39
Clinton 49
Paul 40
Clinton 48
Bush 38
Clinton 49
Perry 39
This is what EU Budget Commissioner Georgieva said at a press conference just now:
“As we all know the UK receives a rebate on their contribution, but in years when the UK has to pay additional because of GNI corrections, normally this payment would be on 31 December and it would be in the full amount.
With the proposal [under discussion]…in exceptional years this period of time would be stretched into the next year, and when this happens, and it would be in these exceptional circumstances, then the payment and the rebate on the payment could converge.
In a normal year, they would not. In a normal year, you have a payment on 31 December and then next year, in the spring, we have the calculation of the rebate on this payment.”
http://openeuropeblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-17bn-question-whos-right-osborne.html
Oh...
No, that is what Cameron claimed, isn;t it? or if it wasn;t, what did he claim?
The very fact Osborne is claiming this as some sort of victory shows how very divorced from what his own party's views he is. And the country's,
"The rebate is calculated as approximately two-thirds of the amount by which UK payments into the EU exceed EU expenditure returning to the UK."
If we assume that - since the EU budget is not increased by this extra contribution from Britain, as it is balanced by refunds to other countries - then the rebate on the €2.1bn should be two-thirds, not half. So we're over-paying by about £300 million...
So this is the normal rebate, applied by the standard EU rules, and all that has changed is the payment deadline.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-29720463
OK have it your way. I reckon Osborne and Cameron just increased Reckless' majority by another 2k.
And that is what counts, in the end.
http://www.muckspreading.com/image.axd?picture=2011/7/ToryDonkey.jpg
How much does Blair's giving-up of 20% of the rebate total over the years, compared to this extra payment?
07/11/2014 14:41
Don't be fooled people: @DanHannanMEP is right: twitter.com/DanHannanMEP/s…
You can tell how slick the presentation has been by how many people are getting hot under the collar about it.
The delay has been a piece of theatre designed to mislead the public.
And it is apparently not normal application of existing rules either.
Apart from that, good post
Osborne sees paying more to the EU as a victory. How deluded and out of touch with public opinion and his own party is he...??
07/11/2014 16:14
On @George_Osborne claim #UK cut €2.1bn #EU bill in half, @edballsmp: "Not 1 penny has been saved compared to 2wks ago." Hard to argue w/him
And as ever, it makes pb you-kippers look like a miserable old bunch. Moan bloody moan day-in day-out. I'm reminded of that wonderful moment Reagan turned to the equally miserable and sour-faced Walter Mondale and said 'there you go again.'
People will be dancing in the streets tonight in celebration. . .
Labour's £400 trillion bankers bonus tax, UKIP's millions of Romanians, the SNP''s bottomless pit of oil.
You Tories really are bloody stupid if you actually believe this garbage. Of course more likely is you don't believe it but you just can't bring yourself to admit that Cameron and Osborne are lying.
And if that wasn't possible, for whatever legal, diplomatic, political reason, then have the guts to say it. We've had years of gutlessness in Europe: Blair giving the rebate away, Brown hiding when he signed the treaty, a nation bent over as we accept more and more EU laws. So I'd like to see us being less polite about it all.
I'd like to give the EU a chance, a fair hearing. I'd like to see its supporters come out and really make a persuasive case for it, especially when we keep giving it our hard-earned money. Why don't they? It's worrying that this giant, expensive, undemocratic club we are part of has nobody trumpeting its benefits. It's like the world's worst time-share.
So I'm disappointed we're giving this money back. And all this crap about winning a victory won't win a single vote. The government really is out of touch on issues like this.
It is not surprising, Americans are one of the most individualistic societies in the western world, alongside maybe Switzerland and Australia, although even 70% Australians want to tax the rich more and spend more on public services according to one poll http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/05/australians-want-tax-rich-spend-health-schools
However, the differences can be exaggerated, for instance while Americans want their own taxes cut, 57% favour higher taxes on the richest Americans, much like the British http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/federal_budget/november_2012/57_favor_tax_hike_on_those_who_make_over_250_000 Over 60% of Americans want to cut overseas aid spending too, much like the British, but less than 20% want to cut Medicare and Social Security, much like the British want to protect NHS and pensions spending http://today.yougov.com/news/2013/07/26/cut-foreign-aid-military-spending/
While there is a big gulf between UK Labour and US Republican voters on tax and spend, with 73% of Labour voters wanting believing public spending is a moral obligation and only 23% people should keep their money and only 24% of Republicans believing in public spending's morality with 70% believing people should their money, the UK Conservatives and US Democrats are quite close together with 55% of Tories believing in the morality of public spending and 40% that people should keep their money only just behind the 56% of Democrats who believe that. public spending is moral and the 37% who believe people should keep their money. Most Tories and certainly most Labour and LD supporters would be Democrats in the US, however that is not necessarily true of UKIP supporters with a recent yougov showing 21% of UKIP supporters believe the cuts are too shallow compared to 16% of Tories and only 12% of the UK as a whole
http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/79dheq09yb/YG-Archive-Pol-Sun-results-031114.pdf
I am awestruck by the weaseliness of your "apparently". Which is it, normal application of existing rules or not?
This is beginning to take me back to 2012. Rebateshambles.
"As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a 'categorical pledge' were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April...
"But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head.
"For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all.
"Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain."
The net effect of this budget adjustment was always going to be nil for the EU budget as a whole, as the money paid by those asked to pay more (eg UK, Netherlands) was going to be paid out to others who were deemed to have paid too much (eg France).
So it should be simple to tell me which countries will be receiving less money as a refund if the UK is paying less?
In this debate, they are all telling a version of the truth, but slanted to the narrative they want to convey.
Have Osborne's actions won back a single one of the millions of soft kipper votes the tories need next year...???
Quite the reverse, I would suggest. Reckless' majority will be bigger as a result.
'Except all the people now claiming it is the normal application of existing rules are pretending to be experts after the fact.'
Yes, amazing how many EU experts we suddenly have who somehow forgot to mention the 50% rebate would apply until after it happened.
In much the same way Kerry backed Obama over his former primary rival John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, he he felt had been insufficiently supportive in 2004
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/article4260251.ece
Likewise with the emergency ban on immigrants - how's that getting on?
To summarise:
Labour agrees with EU membership. We will work constructively. We won't withdraw. Outcome: still members in 2020.
UKIP disagrees. They will work destructively, and withdraw as soon as possible. Outcome: non-members in 2020.
The Conservative leadership, on the whole, agrees with membership. However, they'll play so many games of silly buggers that neither supporters nor opponents nor Europeans can work out what they're up to. Outcome: probably still members in 2020, but everyone terminally pissed off.
The first two positions are reasonably clear. The third is just, well, silly.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4260008.ece
Is it because they might make the wrong choice?
'Labour agrees with EU membership. We will work constructively. We won't withdraw. Outcome: still members in 2020.'
Is there any change to Labour's EU policy from 1997 - 2010 ?
Labour will continue to give away our rebate,concede to every EU demand whilst telling voters the EU needs reforming and when the going gets tough promise a referendum that will be reneged on.