Syed Kamall, on behalf of the ECR Group. – Mr President, with friends like that, who needs enemies? Can I come back another time? (Referring toremarks made by members of the EFDDGroup.)

So what came out of last Friday’s Council meeting? A clear signal that there is still a long way to go to persuade Member States to sign up to a bigger budget and also how to select the next Commission President. A number of EU Member State governments know that their voters do not want them to simply sign blank cheques to fund the ambitions of the Commission and the leaders of two or three of the larger Member States. Members of this House can no longer dismiss those voters, those politicians and those governments who question the agenda of political integration or simply label them as being anti-EU, for once you step outside the EU bubble, it is clear that the call for more Europe, whatever the problem, is the voice of an elite, not the voice of citizens in many of our countries.

National governments and voters want to feel that they get value out of the EU for what they pay in. Not all of them want to see a 1950s agenda of political integration. On the whole, the voters want to see a budget that is well managed and matches their priorities, a budget that provides security and well—functioning asylum and immigration systems, and a budget that encourages a cleaner environment, innovation and job creation. But – and members of the ECR Group would want me to be very clear on this point – a budget should not be used to buy solidarity, to bribe Member States into taking asylum seekers, or to control or punish the actions of individual Member States, especially when the Member State pushing for the policy itself broke the rules and, in the process, nearly destroyed the EU’s asylum system.

So, as President Tusk has already admitted, agreeing a budget before the next election is probably unrealistic, but even if all of you here and the EU institutions cannot agree on a budget, those politicians facing their electorates in 2019 should all be clear about what modernising the budget really means, about how the EU will face the massive hole after the UK leaves, and whether the EU budget will be one of coercion rather than cooperation between 27 equal Member States.

So the ECR Group’s question to the Council and the Commission is simple: Is the EU facing a future where decisions continue to be made by all 27 Member States, or a future where decisions are dictated by the few?

(Applause)