Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron: The tide of ideas and opinion is going in my direction on EU reform

David Cameron’s restrictions on welfare for new migrants have pleased Tory backbenchers – but not enough for them to drop their Commons campaign for the transitional immigration controls to be extended. There are now 46 Conservative MPs signed up to support it, and I’ve just spoken to Nigel Mills, who tabled the amendment, who said:

‘The Prime Minister’s announcements are welcome steps in the right direction. However the issues with our current levels of unemployment and pressures on other public services would not be tackled so I still believe we need to keep the restrictions in place, and so I will still proceed with my amendment.’

Labour is briefing that it was the growing support Mills’s amendment that pushed Downing Street into announcing all these new restrictions today. Certainly it all seems rather last minute. But a Downing Street source said after PMQs today that ‘there has been a lot of work on this for some months and the ministerial working group has been working on this for months’. The source said it had taken time for these policies to see the light of day because of the complex legal issues surrounding them. And Theresa May told the Commons this afternoon that ‘it is highly likely that we will find ourselves in considerable disagreement with the European Union about the measures that we have taken. But we are prepared to do that’.

But the Prime Minister is also hoping that his announcement that he wants broader reform of the freedom of movement in the European Union will be seen by his Conservative colleagues as a ‘welcome step in the right direction’. This afternoon, he argued in an interview with the BBC that ‘I think that the tide of ideas and opinion is going in my direction’.

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