Giving it all away

I work in the advertising side of magazine publishing and a large part of my job is negotiating. The two main principles in successful negotiating are:

1. Think "win - win". This means that both parties in the negotiation come away with a deal that suits them and are happy to continue doing business.
2. Never give anything away. Give-aways are easy, negotiating is difficult.

While reading through the Times article above it struck me that Blair, Straw and their team could do with a negotiation course. I don't know about you but £8 Billion sounds like a lot of money to hand over in return for a very loose promise from the EU to look at their budget at some point in the future.

The rebate is to offset the hugely iniquitous Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which is so deeply flawed it is beyond belief. The CAP along with the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) are evil and need to be scrapped. Using your and my tax money to subsidise inefficient European farmerss (mainly in France b.t.w.) while dumping the excess production on the developing world is just plain wrong.