It looks like my good friend Tony has finally grown a pair. Following calls from France and other countries to scrap it, Tony Blair has pointed out that the UK annual rebate from the EU is fully justified.

French president Jacques Chirac is deeply unpopular in France and is still reeling from his people's rejection of his precious EU constitution through that inconvenient democracy thing. He's no fool though, and knows that an easy way to boost your popularity in France is to take a swing at Britain and appeal to that insular superior sentiment France is famous for.

So Chirac has asked Britain to make a "gesture of solidarity" in giving up it's rebate. Obviously this "solidarity" won't extend to reform of the hugely biased, unfair, costly and morally repugnant Common Agricultural Policy, which accounts for nearly half the EU budget! In return, Tony Blair pointed out that Britain's "solidarity" already extends to having contributed 2.5 times more to the EU than France or Italy over the last decade (even after taking account of the rebate)! It seems the UK is still the paymaster of Europe.

Follow up:

Essentially, the CAP allows farmers, mostly in France, to sponge of the EU taxpayer. The CAP is less a 'policy' than a form of state benefit, but it stops the government having to count useless farmers as unemployed!

The rationale behind the rebate was that Britain received less back from the EU than other countries, because it's economy was less dependent on agriculture. This hasn't changed since 1984 when Margaret Thatcher negotiated the deal.

Unsurprisingly, in his call for "solidarity", Chriac doesn't mention that even in 2013 France can still expect to recieve £6bn (€9bn) from EU farm subsidies alone!! Gordon Brown kindly pointed out the error in M. Chriac's thinking: "To suggest that the problems that Europe faces or that referendums were lost, or unemployment is 10% because of the British rebate is to wish away problems that Europe must face up to."

In other words, the cheese-eating surrender-monkeys across the channel should stop blaming the UK because their mismanaged economy is failing due to being consistently held to ransom by strikes and militant trade unionism.

In case all this is too complicated for the French government to understand I'll put it in plain English: Scrap the CAP - then we'll talk!