Where is the UK headed?

[Brown, Jon Brow]

I think we should be careful not to be too reactionary regarding this. £1.7 billion may sound like a huge figure but if you take into account the decade or so we've been apparently underpaying for, it amounts to a rounding error of about 0.1%.

It should have little or no effect on the economic arguments that overwhelmingly favour us staying in the EU.

However, the whole thing has been badly handled by the UK government and the EU. Some of the people inside the Treasury will have known about this for months or longer, so it shouldn't have been allowed to come as a surprise. And the EU seems to be completely oblivious to the political hot potato that it is at the minute in the UK. Why announce it now when we have a bye-election in a few week where one of the front-running parties is anti-EU?