The Brussels Blog is shutting down for the holidays. Thanks to all our readers who have helped make the blog one of the best-read sources for EU and European news on the Internet. We’ve got a lot more planned for the new year, so please check back in January, when we’ll continue to try to bring you a taste of what’s being talked about around town – and throughout the continent. Read more

On the second and final day of the EU summit, attention turned briefly away from the ongoing eurozone crisis and onto a letter the British government was circulating to get other member states to agree to freezes in the EU’s budget.

During their post-summit press conference, both Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said they would sign onto the effort, giving David Cameron, the UK prime minister, significant backing.

After breaking the story Thursday night, we have obtained a copy of the letter being circulated and thought we’d post it here. The so-called “financial framework” and “financial perspectives” mentioned is the seven-year budget cycle that begins in 2014. Negotiations over the new multi-year budget are due to begin in mid-2011.

The next multiannual financial framework will come as Member States make extraordinary efforts to clean up public finances. These efforts are intended to bring down public deficits and public debt to a sustainable level in keeping with an enhanced fiscal and macroeconomic monitoring framework.

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One of the more mysterious elements of the summit, which is now wrapping up, is the chatter about some of the EU’s big countries looking to cap community spending for up to a decade, as we reported in today’s paper.

The plan is to keep net EU contributions at the same levels, adjusted for inflation. If you assume the European economy grows by a couple of percentage points a year in real terms, that would mean EU spending falling as a percentage of GDP from roughly 1 per cent today to 0.8 per cent by 2020.

That would amount to stopping the European project dead in its tracks, critics of the letter say. Those critics broadly fall in two categories: Euroenthusiasts and net recipient countries. Read more

We have an agreement.

According to a senior European minister, the heads of government have broken for dinner after reaching an agreement on the language for changes to the EU treaty to create a new bail-out system for the eurozone.

We haven’t seen the language yet, but the minister said that it remains just two sentences. Clauses were inserted into both sentences, however, that toughened up the amendment a bit. But the changes fall short of the initial demands made by Germany to make explicit that the new rescue fund could only be used as a last resort. Read more