The absurdity of the EU’s little town masquerading as an equal country.
And no l have not made the mistake of calling Luxembourg a town instead of a country. It's a well-deserved insult aimed at Luxembourg and its people who have elected their village idiot Prime Minister Xavier Bettel who Insulted our PM yesterday.
Readers will have seen and read media coverage of the British Prime Minister’s visit to Luxembourg yesterday. He went there as a courtesy to Jean-Claude Juncker and was treated with contempt.
Here is a ‘country’ which has the same status as the UK when unanimous votes are required in the EU Council, but which has to use a public restaurant for an important international meeting, and has to hold press conferences outside because it doesn’t have a room big enough.
Quite why the British Prime Minister should choose to fly to meet an increasingly infirm and unelected bureaucrat, wedded to the creation of an EU superstate, is beyond me. I really have to wonder at the knowledge and experience of some of the PM’s advisers.
If any serious and final Brexit arrangements are to be done with the EU, Juncker will not be making the decisions. That role falls to Angela Merkel of Germany, and to a lesser extent the French President Emmanuel Macron.
If it was done to show the PM was ‘engaging’ in the Brexit process, then it was always going to be a disaster. Boris Johnson was at the mercy of the EU machine and its loyal europhiliacs in the little Luxembourg state. On home turf they created the conditions to humiliate the British Prime Minister, using a few dozen disloyal ex-pats with loud-hailers and music sound systems to do their dirty work for them.
Luxembourg, you asked for this
EU’s second-tiniest ‘country’ has to use a public restaurant, hold press conferences outside
Little Luxembourg doesn’t have a room big enough for Boris.
You can fit the citizens of little Luxembourg into the United Kingdom 191 times over
It has only 314,000 citizens, compared to 59,967,000 in the UK
All the media reports yesterday stated Luxembourg’s population as being 600,000. They failed to account for the fact that almost half the population are not, in fact, Luxembourgers at all.
Geography
In geographical size, little Luxembourg can be fitted into the United Kingdom 95 times over
It covers just 2,595 square kilometres, compared to the UK’s 247,763 square kilometres
In imperial measurements, it is just 51 miles long by 35 miles wide
It is surrounded by Germany, France and Belgium
Economy
When it comes to economic power, Luxembourg is 1/40th of the size of the UK
It’s 2018 GDP was €58.9 billion, compared to the UK’s €2,393.7 billion
Luxembourg has been a tax haven for decades
General
Luxembourg has no navy and no air force
Bizarrely, Luxembourg City houses the European Court of Justice and is one of the EU’s four capitals
Its most famous product is one Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the EU Commission.
Once again the British people have seen the contemptuous behaviour of the EU towards the United Kingdom. I think that more and more ordinary people — the ‘soft-middle’ who voted Remain in the EU Referendum because they believed the now-discredited threats and lies of Project Fear — are now seeing the EU for what it is.
I believe that the EU’s mockery of the people of the United Kingdom, and it's Prime Minister, will come back to bite the EU very hard indeed.
Here’s everything you need to know about Luxembourg.
A controversial tax haven that saves big business and the mega-rich millions
A major investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2014 showed that Luxembourg was being used as a tax haven. The scandal became known as ‘Lux Leaks’.
An analysis of almost 28,000 pages of leaked financial documents showed the government of Luxembourg had granted beneficial tax deals to a number of large corporations.
The documents showed more than 300 companies such as Burberry, Heinz, Dyson, Pepsi, IKEA and Deutsche Bank were among those to channel funds through the tiny European nation using complex financial structures.
The deals — which were legal — allowed companies to pay less tax on the money they moved to Luxembourg with the transactions also remaining secret.
Jean-Claude Juncker came under fierce scrutiny when the story first broke because he was in charge of the country when many companies were taking advantage of the tax avoidance schemes.
The president of the European Commission earlier this year reportedly described his initial response to the ICIJ investigation as a ‘major mistake’ because he ‘took too much time to respond’ to it.
‘I should have responded immediately,’ Mr Juncker reportedly said in May.
Luxembourg’s economy is less than HALF the size of the NHS budget
Luxembourg’s gross domestic product in 2017 was about £50 billion — a fairly staggering amount given the fact the country has a population of approximately 600,000.
So while it is only the 164th biggest country by population, it is well inside the top 100 countries in the world when it comes to the size of its economy. However, its economy represents less than half of the budget of the NHS. Total health spending in the UK stood at approximately £129 billion in 2018/19.
In contrast, the United Kingdom’s gross domestic product in 2017 was more than £2 trillion.
That puts the UK inside the top 10 economies in the world. The UK’s population of just over 67 million people puts Britain in the top 30 countries by population size.
Its most famous export is… Jean-Claude Juncker
Mr Juncker was elevated to the world stage in 2014 when he was installed as the president of the European Commission. Before that date, no one had ever heard of the man outside Luxembourg.
Before that, he was the prime minister of Luxembourg from 1995 to 2013 — an 18-year term which made him the longest-serving head of any national government in the EU.
His time as the top bureaucrat in Brussels has been anything but straight forward and he has shown something of a penchant for putting himself at the centre of political firestorms.
In 2015 he sparked controversy when he welcomed Hungarian leader Viktor Orban to Brussels by saying ‘the dictator is coming’ before shaking hands with a cheeky smile. You can see there is a pattern emerging of Luxembourg PMs insulting leaders of larger counties.
Sources: All data above comes from Eurostat, the official EU statistics agency
