Nigel Farage has suggested the United Kingdom cut off Brexit “divorce” payments to the European Union should it follow through with threats to ban vaccine exports to Britain.
The Brexit champion said that the EU has shown its “true colours”, accusing Brussels of acting like a communist regime through “seizing the means of production” at vaccine factories across Europe.
Over the weekend, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen threatened to block the export of up to 19 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to Britain, saying: “We have the possibility to forbid planned exports.”
The British government in turn has signalled that it will have “no choice” but to halt exports of the raw materials required to produce the vaccine to the continent.
Mr Farage said that the British government should take a tougher line with the bloc, suggesting that the country withhold payments pledged to the EU under the terms of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement.
“We’re still paying vast sums of money to an organization that threatened to put a border back in Ireland, to an organization that is taking a series of legal actions against us, to an organization that has made exporting goods into the EU unnecessarily difficult — totally contrary to the spirit of the agreement,” Mr Farage said.
Under the Withdrawal Agreement, the British taxpayer will pay the EU 11 billion pounds this year, with an additional £8.7 billion projected for next year.
“From the referendum vote to us finally getting out of these financial obligations, we’ll have paid them nearly 80 billion pounds. I now cannot see why we should pay 10 billion pounds this year to an organization that is acting in bad faith, an organization that is threatening to block legally acquired vaccines,” Mr Farage said.
“I honestly think that the government should stop playing softly-softly with the European Union. They are being absolutely brutish and nasty to us, we just seem to lie down and take it every time… let’s now threaten them with this money,” he demanded.
“They’re in breach of what we signed up and agreed to and if they continue in this manner we will stop giving them billions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money,” Farage said.
“I urge the government in their negotiations to tell the EU, which is struggling for cash anyway, start playing with a straight bat or we are not going to send you any more money,” he concluded.
As of March 22nd, 44.6 people per 100 have had at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine in the United Kingdom, compared to just 13.25 per 100 on average throughout the entirety of the EU, according to Our World in Data.
In February, Peter Tiede of the German newspaper Bild said that the EU’s vaccine fiasco has been the “biggest confidence-destroying programme in its history”.
This followed a similar pronouncement from Die Zeit, which declared in an opinion piece in January that the ordeal has been “the best advertisement for Brexit”.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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