UK taxpayer pays into £20 billion EU funds for land-grab of more, poor countries.

Graham Charles Lear
3 min readApr 14, 2019

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There is no status quo with the EU. It spreads like a cancer growth, invading deeper into our national life. It is also constantly seeking to expand its empire. Here is just one small example of this.

I just wonder if Remain MPs such as we have in Parliament know about this little EU wheeze. My bet is they would look at you with a blank look if you told them about the Pre-accession Assistance (IPA)

A little-discussed part of the EU’s work and the money it spends is its constant preoccupation with growing in size. Part of the EU budget is dedicated to this and the sums are significant.

The Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA) is the means by which the EU supports the ‘enlargement countries’ with financial and technical help.

The current budget is for the period 2014–2020 and it has risen to € 11.7 billion. Together with the €11.3 billion in 2007–2013 this makes €23 billion, or circa £20 billion pounds.

Receiving €4.5 billion for 2014–2020, Turkey is by far the largest beneficiary of the IPA II funds.

This sum is IN ADDITION to the €6bn which the EU is giving to Turkey to stem the flow of migrants to Germany after Frau Merkel’s disastrous ‘All welcome here’ unilateral announcement in 2015.

Here are the totals for all countries receiving this largesse

MONEY BEING GIVEN TO COUNTRIES WANTING TO JOIN EU, 2007–2020

Albania €1.24bn

Bosnia & Herzegovina €0.78bn

Croatia €1bn (now a member)

Iceland €0.3 billion (decided it didn’t want to join the EU)

Kosovo €1.28bn

Macedonia €1.28bn

Montenegro €0.51bn

Serbia €2.89bn

Turkey €9.25bn

Multi-country €4.1bn

Further amounts in the total are as yet unallocated

TOTAL € 23 billion (approx £10 billion pounds)

Note that these figures do NOT include the €6bn paid to Turkey as a result of Mrs. Merkel’s migrant crisis.

[Source: EU Commission ]

The EU is the only club that pays you to join

In most instances of a club welcoming new members, it is the prospective members who have to pay a joining fee.

This is not the case with the EU.

It’s the EU that effectively now pays the prospective members to join. Please note that the UK received no such payments to join in 1973.

In addition to the allocation of €11.7bn (approx £10.2bn GBP) in the current budget, the UK paid into the previous budget of €11.3bn.

So, that’s a total of €23 billion (approx £20 billion GBP) since 2007.

Strangely, when a country wishes to leave the club, the EU insists on what is in effect a leaving bill. For the UK, Mrs. May has so far agreed to £39 billion, but there is no limit on this and we can be certain it will be much, much higher.

As part of this bill, Mrs. May has agreed to continue footing the bill for the EU to grow its membership.

This is one of the enormous numbers of areas of the EU’s activities where it seems wholly inappropriate — whatever the other arguments — to pay anything towards the EU’s efforts to subsume even more of the European continent into its totalitarian nightmare.

If you were to ask a typical Remainer MP — such as Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve (recipient of the French Legion d’Honneur), Chuka Umunna, Yvette Cooper, or Ken Clarke — about facts like those above, we suspect they wouldn’t have a clue.

Don’t forget, Ken Clarke is the man who even boasted that he had never read the latest EU Treaty, and yet vigorously supported it.

In what world is it acceptable for our supposedly-knowledgeable MPs to dictate our lives on something as important as EU membership when they don’t know — and certainly never quote — any real facts about it?

The EU isn’t static. It changes so fast that we all have trouble keeping up with it. MPs have researchers. They have the House of Commons Library. They also have access to the internet like the rest of us.

Frankly, many readers are much better informed than our MPs. These MPs should hang their heads in shame.

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Graham Charles Lear

What is life without a little controversy in it? Quite boring and sterile would be my answer.