Blair tells Chirac to go fornicate himself.

EU: In the typical nice polite English manner.

"Prime Minister Tony Blair on Thursday rejected calls from France for Britain to make a "gesture" over giving up its European Union budget rebate, saying that years of previous over-payment was "our gesture". "Britain has been making a gesture, because over the past 10 years, even with the British rebate, we have been making a contribution into Europe two and half times that of France," Blair said at Downing Street. "Without the rebate, it would have been 15 times as much as France. That is our gesture." The comments were clearly intended as a rebuff to French President Jacques Chirac, who earlier Thursday called for a British concession on the vexed issue ahead of a crunch EU summit next week."

Update: No wonder Blair was pissed.

"THE only way to tackle a bully is to stand up to him and fight. That’s precisely what Britain is doing to French President Jacques Chirac, who mistakenly thinks he can push us around. Chirac says it is time for his “English friends” to make a gesture to Europe by giving up our £3billion a year EU rebate. Then he makes his own gesture to us — two fingers — by declaring that France will never accept a cut in the aid its inefficient farmers get from the EU. So we lose money but France doesn’t? Not likely. If it wasn’t for our rebate, won by Maggie Thatcher in 1984, Britain would have paid 15 times more to the EU than France did. Since then we’ve still paid two and a half times more than France. Ministers have got “fire in their bellies,” says a Government source.