Stricter benefits limits shouldn't stop with immigrants

With Ukip snapping at the Conservatives’ heels, it is not difficult to see why David Cameron has hit upon the idea of limiting the entitlement of EU migrants to working-age benefits in the UK, so that they can claim only for three months, not six, as before. But it is a little harder to work out how the Prime Minister and his party will benefit politically from the change. No sooner had Cameron made his announcement than two obvious questions arose: if this proposal is legal, why didn’t he do something like it earlier? And if it is possible to limit eligibility to benefits to three months is there any reason he can’t go further and prevent EU migrants claiming benefits in Britain at all?

This magazine has long been a keen supporter of open labour markets, but it is self-evident that they are incompatible with an open benefits system. The public purse already struggles to cope with paying benefits to British citizens. To make taxpayers in Britain liable to fund the unemployed from countries whose joint population is significantly in excess of our own is potentially ruinous. That not all eastern Europeans are likely to arrive in Britain to make claims is of little reassurance; the point is that they could, and that the number who will do so is very likely to be of a magnitude greater than official projections. Before the EU expansion in 2004, it might be remembered, Labour ministers predicted that 13,000 eastern Europeans would take advantage of the right to come and live and work in the UK during the first year of membership. In the event 91,000 arrived in the first six months, rising to half a million by 2008.