THE demand from Brussels for an extra £1.7 billion of British taxpayers' money is a travesty.
The austerity measures imposed by the British Government upon the UK have been more severe than those levied upon the populations of most of the eurozone countries and yet we are now being told by the EU to pay more which will be distributed to the likes of France and Germany.
The British people who have taken to the streets in their thousands to protest against a vast drop in living standards will not take kindly to a Brussels diktat which seeks to penalise economic success and reward failure.
The money would be better spent on the NHS or even on more prisons to house the foreign criminals we can't get rid of.
Bob MacDougall,
Oxhill,
Kippen,
Stirlingshire.
The mock shock expressed by David Cameron that the UK should pay an additional £1.7bn into the European Union budget on December 1 is laughable.
This payment was known about by the Treasury last week and was not in fact "sprung" on the Prime Minister. In addition, the increase is based on an annual review of the economic performance of the member states based on a new mechanism of internationally-agreed accounting rules.
These rules, the European System of National and Regional Accounts, date from 2010 and were introduced in September 2014. Its main impact was to include more financial and capital transactions into measures of national wealth. The potential impact of these rules on how much the UK would have to pay into EU coffers was therefore well established and agreed to.
It may be viewed as being perverse that the UK is having to pay more because of the performance of the UK economy. However, as with many things EU-related, the UK should have not have signed up to such rules if it was not willing to abide by them, or at least made its concerns known earlier.
What the embarrassing timing of this whole affairs demonstrates is that while Mr Cameron is looking for wholesale reform of the EU, he has very few allies in the corridors of power in Brussels.
Alex Orr,
Flat 2,
77 Leamington Terrace,
Edinburgh.
IF Ian McConnell ("Inconvenient truth for Osborne lies in record low interest rates", The Herald, October 24) still thinks that the UK economy is in such a bad state, can he please explain why the EU thinks it is doing awfully well?
RA Durward,
Westwood,
Montrose Terrace,
Bridge of Weir.
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