Jean-Claude Junker slams David Cameron and Italian PM Mario Renzi
Jean-Claude Junker has hit out at David Cameron and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi for their confrontational stance toward the EU.
The European Commission President said David Cameron's account of the situation in Brussels was "not correct" and that he "didn't like the way several prime ministers were behaving after the European Council".
David Cameron has been increasingly critical of Brussels after the UK was presented with a €2.1bn (£1.7bn) bill. Speaking on Friday the Prime Minister said:
It’s a €2bn bill. It gets presented with a month to go. That is not an acceptable way to behave, and it’s not an acceptable sum of money.
I am not paying that bill on December 1. If people think I am, they have got another think coming.
The bill came thanks to the way Brussels calculates what each member state pays towards the EU. Because the UK is growing significantly more than its partners in the Eurozone, it is on the hook for more contributions.
The bill couldn't have come at a worse time for David Cameron with polls showing eurosceptic Ukip on course to win the Rochester and Strood by-election.
However, it was Renzi who was on the receiving end of most of Junker's attack. He told the European Parliament:
For a long period of time, I've taken notes, and I was always comparing what is said in the room and what is said outside the room. And from time to time it happens that the notes are not coinciding.
I have to tell my good friend Matteo Renzi that I am not the chairman of a gang of bureaucrats… I am the president of the European Commission, which is a political body.
Renzi had attacked the EU for being overly bureaucratic and wasteful of taxpayer money. He didn't take Junker's comments lightly replying:
I ask for respect for Italy, its past, its future. Or rather, I insist on the sort of respect the country deserves.