European Communities (Finance) Bill

Indeed, I had already touched on that. Why are we giving more money to Belgium and Luxembourg? If more money has to go on administration, we in this country have a policy of trying to disperse jobs from the rich centre to the poorer periphery. Why is that policy not being adopted by the European Union? That seems an absurdity to me. I am aware that the cuts in our rebate are going to be end-loaded—compressed into the last year of the seven-year budget. We are not giving up the rebate completely in 2007-08. We give up 20 per cent. in 2009, 70 per cent. in 2010, and we have agreed to give up 100 per cent. of the funds between 2011 and 2013. Why has that process been end-loaded? Presumably they saw us coming, and it is now much more difficult for us to negotiate our way back. We have a far more disadvantageous deal than we would if the rebate were evenly given up over the period in question. At the end, we would end up with a better figure from which to work. I remember from when I was negotiating that if we could manage to get a deal that gave us a certain percentage over a year, but it was end-loaded, we started off in a much better position in the subsequent year. I can only assume that those elementary lessons in negotiating had not been passed on to the British negotiators, and I can only assume that the European Union saw us coming, and decided that taking sweets off children was quite an enjoyable process—but I will not digress. The difficulties caused by our failure in the negotiations spill over into other areas of interest for the British Government. We have an excellent record in the area of foreign aid. We have worked exceptionally hard, but we ought to be exceedingly concerned about the way in which our commitments to retain CAP spending have locked us into negotiating positions, in the Doha round and so on, that make world trade talks more difficult than they otherwise would have been. The agreement places us in a position that is directly against the interests of the third world in world trade talks. I can see why the French wanted to put us in that position, but I cannot understand why we were willing to accept it. We must do better subsequently.