EU told ‘disgusting’ lies about UK – MEP

EU CHIEFS should apologise for smearing Britain with “disgusting lies” over Brexit – and could learn from our rollout of Covid vaccines, an Italian MEP said yesterday.

Antonio Maria Rinaldi told the European Parliament the UK had freed itself from Brussels’ “swamps of regulations and bureaucracy”.

And taunting colleagues over their plan to sue Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca over jab supplies, Mr Rinaldi, 66, said: “We hope that the lawyers in charge are not the same ones who formulated the contracts last year!

“Why is the [European] Commission not using some very good London law firm this time? They would be sure to win.”

With a population seven-times larger than the UK, the EU has protected just 96.7 million people and a further 35 million have had two doses, according to the publication Our

World In Data. The UK has fully vaccinated a quarter of all UK adults.

Mr Rinaldi, right, said: “Seeing as no one has had the courage and humility to apologise to the citizens of the United Kingdom for the lies that have been told just for daring to no longer follow the EU’s erroneous dictates, then I do so in this moment.

“How many disgusting lies have we had to hear from politicians screaming, ‘Britain is destroyed’, just because they are terrified of a dangerous precedent?

“They didn’t understand the legitimate will of a great and proud country that preferred to exercise its sovereignty in a democratic way instead of delegating it to grey bureaucrats who have shown they cannot manage a condominium. “Characters who, if they had worked in a private company, would have been immediately kicked out.”

Mr Rinaldi was speaking before a final European Parliament vote last night to rubber-stamp the postBrexit trade and

security treaty.