European leaders, we are told, have been charmed by David Cameron since he formed
the coalition government – today, we must hope that he can use that charm to good effect. The Prime Minister heads to the EU Summit in Brussels later, following an evening of earnest phone conversations with his French and German counterparts. His plea was simple: reject a planned 6 percent rise in the EU budget
for next year. But the outcome is hazy. While our government wants the budget to be frozen in 2011, the likelihood is that it will alight somewhere between the 2.9 percent sought by the European
Council and the 6 percent agreed by the European Parliament.
Which means Cameron’s attention may well turn to freezing the EU Budget for the 2014-2020 spending period, as he suggested in PMQs last week.
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