From Fraser Nelson: David Cameron proposing delaying welfare payments to EU immigrants – which some might see as his listening more to Lynton Crosby and less to the likes of modernisers like Nick Boles (whose approach to politics Bruce Anderson critiques below). But Boles has advocated going far further: deporting EU immigrants who don’t work. He believes he has found a clause in EU law that allows it. Given that Boles is generally seen as an uber-moderniser, I thought Coffee Housers may be interested in seeing another side to his political thought – a deportation plan which is further than most right-wing Tory MPs would go. The below is abridged from his book ‘Which Way’s Up’?
I have changed my mind about immigration. It was only when I was elected onto Westminster City Council that I began to discover the downside of mass immigration. As chairman of the housing committee, I had to help the council wrestle with the pressure on social housing from asylum seekers and other migrants. It made it impossible for young adult children to find accommodation in the communities in which they had grown up and where their parents still lived.
Then came the 7 July bombings in London. As we learned more about the bombers, we discovered that they had been born in Britain, gone to local schools, played cricket at local clubs; one had even become a primary school teacher. Something had clearly gone very wrong in the communities in which these young men grew up. While nothing diminishes the bombers’ personal responsibility for their evil acts, it was plain that, for decades, we had failed to integrate recent immigrants into our society or pass on our values to them and their children.
Now we face a fiscal crisis which will require drastic cuts in public spending. We will not be able to sustain a social contract in which schooling and healthcare are provided to all citizens free of charge and are funded by taxation if we continue to allow, every year, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to join the queues at A&E and send their children to British schools. Nor can we sit back while eight million British citizens of working age either shun or are shut out from all forms of useful economic activity because employers can find migrant workers who will accept subsistence wages to do menial jobs.
The UK should seek to impose permanent restrictions on the free flow of people from any new member states, such as Croatia or Turkey, but the retrospective introduction of controls on immigration from existing EU member states would be hugely controversial and very unlikely to be accepted by other EU countries. Nevertheless, there are other steps the coalition government could take which would help allay public concern about immigration from within the EU.
I am the MP for the south-western corner of Lincolnshire, a county which has seen large numbers of migrant workers from eastern Europe come in to work in the fields harvesting vegetables. When I talked to people about immigration during the election campaign, I soon discovered that most of them had a high respect for the work ethic of Polish migrants in particular. What caused anger and resentment was the sense that some EU migrants were abusing our benefits system, by claiming child benefit for children not even living in the UK, putting unreasonable pressure on the NHS by travelling to the UK to give birth or get treatment for long- term conditions, or jumping the queue for scarce social housing. If the coalition government were seen to take robust action to tackle some of these abuses, even at the risk of legal challenge, I believe it would do a great deal to reassure people that Britain is not letting its generosity be exploited.
How can this be done? European Directive 2004/38/EC deals with the right of the citizens of the Union and their family members to move freely within the territory of the member states and live where they like. This directive maintains the requirement that EU citizens need to ‘exercise an economic activity or dispose of sufficient resources in order to take up residence in another Member State’. If this requirement was incorporated into British law, it should now be robustly enforced.
If it wasn’t properly incorporated, the relevant legislation should be amended to give the authorities the power to do so. In future, whenever a migrant from within the EU applies to a central or local government authority for benefits or housing or part of the NHS for non-emergency healthcare, that authority should be required to check whether the individual in question either has a job or sufficient funds to support themselves in the UK. If they don’t, they should be told to leave the country and be denied all benefits and other services (except emergency healthcare) on the basis that they are not legally resident in the UK.
It should also be possible to challenge some other alleged abuses. EU social security co-ordination rules make clear that, in the event that one parent is resident in the UK but the children are resident in another EU member state, any family benefits that are based on residence (such as child benefit) should be paid by the country where the children are living, not the UK. EU migrants claiming child benefit in the UK should be required to provide evidence that their children are resident in the UK and this should be checked on a regular basis. This approach should be firmly enforced and defended in the courts, if necessary.
The government should also act to exclude recent migrants from EU member states from waiting lists for social housing. Social housing is in scarce supply and should be reserved for long-standing residents with real need. We should pass legislation to restrict social housing to people who have been resident in the UK for at least five years, so that the right to social housing becomes something that you earn after a sustained commitment to British society.
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