EU politics: mind games and snake oil solutions

28/11/2013

"Britain is not acting alone in taking these steps", David Cameron was keen to assure us in his Financial Times extravaganza on restricting migration (not). But, as with everything else the Prime Minister does, smoke billows thickly over the mirrors.

Far from having any serious support, says Euractiv, Mr Cameron is in a small minority, so much so that interior ministers meeting in Brussels next week (5 December) will not form a united front with him against free movement of workers. They are too divided on the issue.

Apparently, only three others, Germany, Austria and Holland, can be relied upon even to show any enthusiasm for restricting welfare benefits in general. Apart from that, there is no emerging group of member states resisting the lifting of restrictions on Bulgaria and Romania.

Furthermore, even amongst the "gang of four", there is no commonality of view. Each of the countries has different issues. In Germany, the fear is of a marked rise in the numbers of Roma who might migrate to the large German cities next year. The Dutch are concerned about illegal employment contracts being handed to migrants who do not honour EU rules, and the UK has its problem with so-called "benefits tourism".

On the other hand, the European Commission is not sitting back and letting the opposition making the running. It has issued a robust statement arguing strongly in support of the right to free movement, taking the stance that it is "helping Member States to reap the positive benefits it brings".

Meanwhile, EU employment commissioner László Andor has been very much in evidence as the Commission's attack dog. "We're not speaking about immigration here, we're speaking about the free movement of workers", he declared angrily on Radio 4's Today programme, dismissing Cameron's "benefit curbs" as an "unfortunate overreaction".

This and other interventions have been picked up by the legacy media and especially the Mail which has Andor condemning Cameron for making Britain the "nasty country of Europe".

But one wonders why Andor bothers. When Cameron's input is carefully analysed, it is shown to be – as the Guardian puts it - "fact-free political rhetoric". In fact, it is almost entirely content-free rhetoric. The man is playing mind games.

When one looks, for instance, at Cameron's plans to prevent problems arising in the future, we find him telling us that Britain, as part of the Conservative plan "to reform the EU", will now work with others "to return the concept of free movement to a more sensible basis".

But, in substantive terms, that only means pre-empting the next round of enlargement and putting in place new arrangements "that will slow full access to each other’s labour markets until we can be sure the next new entrants (which may include Turkey) will not cause vast migrations".

Here, the only idea on offer is to require a new accession country – but not the existing Member States - to reach a certain income or economic output per head before full free movement was allowed. Then, and one assumes this is linked - it is not entirely clear - individual member states could be freed to impose a cap if their inflow from the EU reached a certain number in a single year.

If entirely confined to new accession states, that could be done via an accession treaty, so Mr Cameron is not even going for a treaty change, and is not proposing any modifications to the right of freedom of movement. When he tells us that he looks forward to working with other countries who also want reform – and to putting the choice about our future in Europe in a referendum – freedom of movement won't be among those "reforms".

Predictably, the lack of content gives Nigel Farage a free run at the issue, only to have him fall before the finishing post when he asserts that, "only UKIP's stance of leaving the EU, restoring full border controls and choosing who enters the UK before they get here is the sensible way forward".

Never mind the fact that two-thirds of our immigration comes from outside the EU and that non-EU family migration, mandated by Council of Europe convention, amounts to 17 percent of all non-EU immigration.

It may appear to be clever politics to offer a "snake oil" cure, and with Mr Cameron offering such a limp hand, Farage may get away with it for a while. But he does it by completely misrepresenting the nature of the problem and then by offering false solutions that will not address complex and long-standing problems.