[Ramrod]

Taxpayers Set to Pay £371 Million a WEEK to Brussels For Next Five Years

drilling down into the budget’s supporting documents reveals that payments to the EU are set to rise year on year for the next half decade.

Buried on page 140 of the 2016 Budget, a single line in one of dozens of weighty tables shows that “Expenditure transfers to EU institutions” will total £10.5 billion in 2015/16, rising to £11.9 billion by 2020/21.

Matters came to a head after it emerged that a popular initiative to abolish VAT on women’s sanitary products was prohibited by EU regulations, forcing Mr Cameron to go cap in hand to his superiors in Brussels to beg them to waive the rules in this instance.

Under current rules a zero percent VAT rate can only be applied to products with the agreement of all 28 member states. On Thursday night, in a prime piece of Brussels horse-trading, his fellow leaders came to his rescue and granted the request to avoid giving pro-Brexit campaigners more ammunition.

Labour MP Paula Sherriff was unimpressed, however. She told the Commons: “One of the key reasons that I am voting to leave is because we are losing more and more control to the EU.

“The people we elect should be responsible for setting the taxes in this country – not unelected EU judges and bureaucrats. It is a fundamental principle of democracy that there should be no taxation without representation, which is what we now have.”