Sparks: EU leaders head for showdown over bloc budget

Negotiating a two-trillion-euro budget in a single December proves that Europe, which cannot agree on anything, has finally found something it can agree to argue about.

They call it a union budget, yet each of the twenty-seven negotiates as though the union were someone else's family; until the name fits the duty, no table can hold a deal.

Leaders who summon a summit, who set a deadline of Christmas, who know the elections coming will break their majority - and who still cannot name what they will cut - how long shall we call prudence what is plainly delay?

Twenty-seven economies, each feeding its own punch card into the same loom, will weave nothing but tangle until someone programs the pattern before the threads arrive.

The matter is this: two trillion of your money is being divided by people racing a calendar, and the rush exists because they fear an election more than they fear the deadline.

He who negotiates against a Christmas clock fights on ground chosen by his enemy; the spring election is the terrain, and they have already conceded it.

Every minister at that table pleads his nation's interest in the language of solidarity, which is precisely how every interest has always pleaded; the question is who pays, and who is being paid to say otherwise.

As water forced through a narrow channel rises in fury, so money pressed through the narrow pass of a deadline rises in conflict; widen the channel, or the flood will choose its own course.

Not one of the twenty-seven will say the word 'France' above a murmur, though it is the only word the meeting is actually about.

Behind the announcement about two trillion euros stands a pensioner in a French village watching her cheque shrink, and whether the union's arithmetic includes her at all is the calculation nobody has performed.

Once again they argue over the same budget, ending with the same faces agreeing to meet again; the room is sealed, and the delegates call the thinning air 'process'.

Twenty-seven worlds orbit one treasury and are told the centre alone determines their seasons; a cosmos with a single fixed point is not order, it is a smaller universe pretending to be the whole.

Things that are hateful: a summit convened to divide two trillion euros before a holiday about giving; a deadline chosen for sentiment; leaders who call urgency what is merely fear of an election.

The claim is that sceptical voters lack understanding of the union's benefits; they have been governed at a distance, instructed by no one in how the money is spent, and then cited as proof they cannot be trusted to decide.

Figures appear to be the subject, but the figures address solvency while the conflict addresses sovereignty; until the two questions are separated, every number placed on the table will be read as an insult.

Racing Christmas to pass the budget is a reform of the calendar, not of the quarrel: the deadline preserves intact every division that made the budget impassable, only faster.

Look at the body politic: the extremities pull from the heart, each limb demanding its own blood, and no summit heals what it refuses to diagnose.

They are optimising the distribution of two trillion euros through a grid designed for one trillion and twenty-six fewer customers; redesign the architecture first, or the losses will burn off before the current arrives.

Count the votes before you sit at the table, know which delegation folds by midnight and which walks out, and never start a crossing because the calendar tells you it is time.

Men raced to divide two trillion euros before Christmas, the season of gifts; I once lived in a jar and lacked for nothing they claim to be buying.