Rodney Smith

Eurocrats may have good cause to feel threatened by a new trend in Europe.

It's the habit, begun by Britain, of arguing for and getting a rebate on the funds these countries pour into EU coffers.

Margaret Thatcher famously argued for and won the first of these concessions from a furious Brussels in the mid-1980s. Now Foreign Secretary Robin Cook is repelling suggestions that Britain abandon its rebate, worth about £2bn a year.

So far so what? Well, Germany has joined in. The Germans are the biggest contributors to the EU. They have been throwing billions of high value marks at the EU for decades on top of the crippling cost of reunifying the two German halves.

Now they're calling a halt.

The EU's annual budget absorbs £60bn of members' taxpayers' savings. A few billion less may not seem to make much difference; not a big threat to the high spending lifestyle of some Eurocrats which so upsets voters - and taxpayers - in Britain and other member states.

But the trend is welcome. Every year, the Commission admits to losing several billions of ECUs (read dollars) to inefficiency and undetected fraud. Anger at this is the main reason why the Commission is for the first time under serious threat of being binned by the European Parliament. It, like member governments, wants more accountability from unelected Eurocrats.

But the new German financial concern is not based on anxiety about EU spending so much as about the tight state of the German economy, and the need to spend on domestic, generally social, programmes. German unemployment is 10%.

But if the debate rages long and loud enough, the message could start to get through to German taxpayers. Then who knows? French taxpayers, Italian taxpayers, earners in Europe's wealthier states, who may start to question the need to pay as much as they do to the EU.