Boris Johnson asks why we should, in effect, be subsidizing young people from all over the European Union to take up University places that might otherwise go to Britons. Why indeed?

It seems that EU students are flooding in to benefit from the generous financial arrangements they can enjoy as EU citizens:

This year British universities are educating 62,000 students from other EU countries, and applications for next year are up 36 per cent. They are flooding in from Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Italy, Sweden and elsewhere, and they are not only taking 5 per cent of the places, but they are also receiving colossal subsidies from the UK taxpayer. The subsidy for teaching is put at £4,000, and then they have the heavily subsidised £3,255 in loans to pay for the tuition fees, a loan that only becomes repayable once they have left university and reached a certain level of income.


Nobody has yet explained to me how the Treasury is supposed to make sure that they eventually cough up. Are we really going to pay to send British tax officials tramping up dusty tracks in Sicily or knocking on doors in Warsaw to find out whether or not a former EU student at a UK university is earning more than £15,000? Add in the subsidies from Scotland, where EU students don't pay tuition fees at all (unlike English students, I might say), and you can see a vast transfer, by the British taxpayer, directly in favour of the education of foreign nationals.


There is nothing like it anywhere else in Europe. The French and the Germans don't pay for the training of our nurses or bus drivers. Why are we paying for their students? The traffic is almost entirely one-way, in the sense that very few British students go to study in continental Europe.

A pertinent question indeed! One is happy enough to have these young people amongst us but not at the expense of our own children's future and certainly not subsisdised by the Taxpayer. Let them pay their own way. Many will still come, attracted by the excellence of our Universities.

But it was something else that caught my eye about Boris' blog and it was this:

On June 17, David Cameron will travel to Brussels for his first EU summit as prime minister. When the silence falls and the goggling interpreters prepare for the first words to be heard from a Tory prime minister in 13 years, he will be thinking – like all British PMs – of two audiences.


To his new amigos he will want to send out a powerful message that the UK is ready to lead in Europe and to ensure that the EU is a force for good. And to the millions of voters back home he will simultaneously want to signal that he will stick up for this country's interests and that he will not allow us to be ripped off by our friends and partners in Brussels.

That Dave will say one thing to his new Euro Chums and something quite different to the people who sent him to Brussels, the UK electorate, will come as absolutely no surprise to us. Dave is at heart a Europhile who will quickly knuckle under to the Euro Consensus. After all, as he amply demonstrated when dropping his cast-iron guarantee to hold a referendum on Lisbon like a hot potato, we know that he has absolutely no stomach whatsoever for taking on the EU.

But it is pleasing to see a senior Tory fingering Dave in advance for all the lies that he will spin us when he comes back from his latest Foie Gras, Lobster and Champagne knees-up with the EU Comrades. Like all of his kind in the present British political elite, lying to the British people about the EU is the default position.

This, of course, is the self-same political elite that seems to be composed entirely of money-grubbing chancers who see the House of Commons and the House of Lords as an a sort of elegant backdrop for them to loot the public purse whilst at the same time tarting themselves up for so many corporate ponces whose bidding they will do for a veritable sackful of gold.

The rank gangrenous mephitis of corruption now oozes from every pore of Westminster. The new Nomenklatura of our age sully the very floors of the Mother of Parliaments by their very presence.

Much has been made of Dave's supposed hard line on Tory miscreants in the Expenses scandal. A hard line was taken on some sacrificial lambs, for sure, but plenty of Dave's cronies were promptly airbrushed from the story and still have their posteriors firmly planted on the Green Benches. Now it seems that another Chum, Sir John Butterfill, has boasted of his closeness to Dave in a Channel 4  Sting operation, reminding us that the Tories are well at it too.

The British people are shortly to have a chance to sweep our the snollygoster class from their snug billets wherein they seem to do little by way of service to us - in large part because most law-making is now done over here in Brussels - and  a lot by way of service to themselves. If at the same time you are inclined to think that they should not be selling out the UK's interests over the Caviar canapés and Krug at cosy little Brussels soirées, then you have a suitable option, which is to vote UKIP come May.