Welfare for migrants ‘will swing EU vote in Yorkshire’

Backing Prime Minister David Cameron’s tough-talking letter sent to European leaders yesterday, Alec Shelbrooke, MP for Elmet and Rothwell, said the in-out referendum’s verdict on Britain’s membership of the union ‘will come down to benefit claimants from the EU’.

Mr Shelbrooke, who sits on the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee, said: “The way benefits are used in the EU are a major driving factor on how people vote.

“With Germany saying they will accept one million refugees and give them EU passports, they could come over here. Under EU rules at the moment they could come to this country and claim benefits.”

Mr Cameron, who has kickstarted his formal negotiation process on reforming Britain’s terms of membership to the EU by writing to President of the European Council Donald Tusk, wants control over benefits for migrants so that they cannot receive anything for four years.

He told a conference held in central London, that after years of free movement to live and work between member states, it was now time to act on the very high levels of migration from within the EU.

It is assumed the welfare cuts could be a very effective deterrent.

Mr Cameron said: “As we have seen so spectacularly across Europe with the questions posed by the migration crisis countries need greater controls to manage the pressures of people coming in.

“And while in Britain we are not part of the Schengen open borders agreement and so we have been able to set our own approach by taking refugees direct from the camps we do need some additional measures to address wider abuses of the right to free movement within Europe and to reduce the very high flow of people coming to Britain from all across Europe.”

Mr Cameron wrote in his letter that people coming to Britain from the EU must live in the country and contribute for four years before they qualify for in work benefits or social housing.

They also want to end the practice of sending child benefit overseas, and those who haven’t found work after six months could be asked to leave the country.

Only economies with relative parity to Britain’s should be able to have unrestricted free movement of its citizens, the Prime Minister argued, which Mr Shelbrooke said should have happened a long time ago.

He said: “I personally feel that the biggest mistake of the last 20 years was the expansion of the EU.

“People say it’s a great achievement to bring in satellite states from the former Soviet Union, but I fundamentally disagree with that.

“You should have had an Eastern European Union and once they had economic parity you could have brought them together.

“The way the EU is at the moment it’s driven down the wages of workers in the UK.”

There has been criticism however that attempting to negotiate a different deal on migrant welfare could be illegal from Martin Schulz, the President of the European Parliament.

The four-year ban on welfare payments may not be lawful, Mr Schulz said yesterday as he reacted to Mr Cameron’s letter.