David Cameron calls for emergency talks after EU demands Britain pay an extra £1.7bn
David Cameron "won't be paying" the extra €2.1bn (£1.7bn) demanded by the EU, he said today.
In a tweet, he said the extra contribution was "an appalling way to behave".
Cameron has called for an emergency meeting of EU finance ministers after the UK was told it must pay up the EU by 1 December.
The Prime Minister is reported to have interrupted a meeting of EU leaders in Brussels to voice his objections to the demands for the UK to dispense more money to the EU budget.
The extra contribution is part of the way Brussels calculates what each member state pays, according to the European Commission. Since the UK is growing significantly more than its partners in the Eurozone, it is on the hook for more contributions.
https://twitter.com/David_Cameron/status/525633082599424000
The announcement was met with fury by Tory MPs who dubbed the charge a "tax on prosperity".
Tory MP Bob Neill, who is taking the EU Referendum Bill through the House of Commons for Cameron, reacted with anger last night, telling CityAM:
It is outrageous to be penalising the prosperity of the UK. This is exactly the thing people in the UK find extraordinary and is the reverse of what a sensible EU should be about.
The surcharge would add roughly a fifth to the UK's budget contribution of £8.6bn. Prominent Tory backbencher John Redwood told Radio 4's Today programme:
[The charge] offends all our principles of natural justice and fair taxation.
It is a very large increase in tax on the British people, charged retrospectively without their agreement
UKIP’s EU budget spokesman, Jonathan Arnott MEP, said:
This farce would be as big a comedy of errors as Ed Miliband's Party Conference speech if it weren't so serious. Cameron broke his promise on the Lisbon Treaty, his much-trumpeted 'budget cut' was actually just a below-inflation rise, he failed to stop Juncker becoming Commission President and his EU 'renegotiation' hasn't removed a single stroke of a pen from a single EU law. Now hard-pressed British taxpayers are being expected to cough up yet another pile of cash that we can't afford.