The European Commission will today launch into a bitter dispute with Britain and other big paymasters of the EU, by demanding billions of extra euros

The European Commission will today launch into a bitter dispute with Britain and other big paymasters of the EU, by demanding billions of extra euros in spending to modernise the former Communist countries after they join the bloc. Commission proposals for funding an expanded EU will be finalised in defiance of calls, repeated by the UK yesterday, for a budget freeze. A document, to be approved by the EU's 20 commissioners in Strasbourg, will also call for the benefits of the British budget rebate, worth about €3bn (£2bn) each year, to be shared among all countries that pay more into EU coffers than they receive. But the main battleground will be over how much to spend between 2007 and 2013, as the EU gets to grips with the challenge of modernising the run-down economies of eastern Europe. The document will start months of acrimonious negotiations and internal divisions because the budget needs to be agreed by all member states. Last night, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, launched a pre-emptive strike, saying it was "unacceptable and unrealistic for the commission to propose a 25 per cent increase in its spending, and ask member states to contribute an extra £20bn". It would, he added, be "wasteful and inefficient to increase spending on Commission programmes which do not match the EU's economic reform priorities and in some cases, such as the common agricultural policy, work against them". The French President Jacques Chirac and the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who met last night, also made clear they wanted to rein in EU spending.