@venator
Evidently not.
@Svejk
For once, a Dally Mildew article I didn't want to smeer at. Good find!
Somehow you just know that every UK penny raised by these tolls would get spent on improving cruddy eastern European roads purely so that France and Germany can get their delivery trucks in and back on the same day and sell them more stuff. Places that are far away enough from us that our delivery costs would wipe out our profits.
The EU has always been about making trading conditions good for Germany and France and they treat us like mugs.
I still recall Jeremy Clarkson's comments about how great the roads in Spain were (1990s?)… that we'd all paid for.
Redistribution of wealth (to the needy) is all very well, within the bounds of a society you are a part of but when your own contribution is redistributed to a completely different geographical area, which you have no intention of going to - beyond your horizons of what you regard 'society' as being - it begins to feel more like offshore raiders landed and robbed you.
If 100% of UK payments to EU were spent back in the UK, that would still be a waste of administrative effort. If we got back more than we paid in, other Euro countries would be moaning about us. I can only conclude that we pay in more than we're getting out.
I am incensed that Milliband was too stupid to realise this and have the sense to put the EU referendum in their manifesto. As things stand, I'm blackmailed into voting Tory, meaning we get the whole package, for the sake of a single issue.
I'm convinced a referendum was promised for this current parliament but the LibDems stopped it or the Tories stalled it themselves, realizing that they could blackmail us with it, in 2015. Anyway their last manifesto will promptly be taken down from their website, like previous embarassments.