# Posted 1:40 AM by Patrick Belton  

A BRITISH AMBASSADOR SPEAKS OUT. By which, of course, I mean to say 'a British ambassador emails two of his colleagues after a dinner party, and it ends up on the front page of the Times'. But it's worth reading anyhow, even if a dubious pleasure. Money bits:

I am being asked to give more UK taxpayers money to an EU which for years can not produce properly audited accounts. Mon ami Jacques with the support of most of you is nagging me to give the EU more money while the refusing to surrender an inch or even a centimetre on the CAP - a programme which uses inefficient transfers of taxpayers money to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa, which we then fail to solve through inefficient but expensive aid programmes. The most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take Communism.

We - unlike most other old EU MS sitting here - have opened our labour markets. HMG have created more jobs for Poles in the past year than the Polish Government. Yet not one of you nor a single newspaper in any of your capitals has expressed a single word of gratitude or appreciation for the UK position in all this. So much for solidarity.

I have here with me a draft press release which says the following:

Following the failure of the EU Budget talks today because most EU member states refused to accept a generous, innovative new budget proposed by HMG, the UK Gov announces that it is going to set aside a good chunk of the money it was prepared effectively to deduct from its rebate under the current proposals, 5 billion pounds, to set up a new Strategic European Development Fund - the Mother of All Know How Funds, but on steroids.

The Fund will go for any sensible strategic development idea that comes along, with emphasis on R&D and Innovation, plus reform of the region's abysmal legal systems, the main Communist - era legacy problem in Europe. But if you want to build some new roads, that's OK too.

The Fund will be managed according to state of the art transparency and efficiency: hard targets set for spending with regular public updates; 90% money spent to require matching private sector funds, so as to encourage new private investment on a vast scale; and so on.

[Aside: PM Marcinkiewicz: you asked me recently to help with ELT in Polish schools - spend 100 million of the Fund on this, so that every kid learns English, plus save money by shutting down French and German language classes!]

[Other interesting bits here equally worth reading while you're procrastinating]

Charles Crawford
HMA Warsaw

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