Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

No 10: EU leaders are on PM’s side after Polish minister criticises immigration plans

The European response to David Cameron’s immigration speech last week was pretty positive, but at some point between now and the formal renegotiation, someone was going to chuck a fly in the ointment. Last night Poland’s deputy foreign minister Rafal Trzaskowski told Newsnight that his country would have a ‘red line’ against Britain treating immigrants from the EU differently when it comes to benefits. He said:

‘If one wants to get away with all the benefits that are enshrined in the regulation of EU and treat immigrants from EU differently, and for example only pay benefits after four years of their stay in Britain or extradite people who can’t find work, that would be against all the existing laws of the EU and obviously that would be a red line for us.’

What does this mean for Cameron’s renegotiation? Remember that Polish politicians have been very sceptical of the direction David Cameron has been taking his European policy in for a while. Today the Prime Minister’s official spokesman tried to argue that there were plenty of other European states who were moving in the same direction as Cameron:

‘I think what you’ve really seen over the last couple of years actually is the work for example that the German government has been doing actually on the impact of migration on its welfare and benefits system, the work that the Home Secretary is doing with her Dutch, German and Austrian counterparts in terms of how freedom of movement is not an unqualified right.

‘Actually I think the real feature over the last couple of year has been how you’ve seen a very important debate in a whole series of European capitals on that and as part of that the Prime Minister has set out his views and we will continue to take this forward with our counterparts.’

Cameron is pleased with the way his Europe speech went down and feels that MPs now have a good strong message to take to voters on the doorstep. A number of eurosceptic MPs say they have made the effort to tell him that since the speech, too. The Prime Minister knew he was never going to get the Bill Cashs of this world on board, but he thinks that the speech has solved the problem for the majority of his party. He also knows that what he has proposed is not an impossible proposition for other European countries, in spite of this disagreement with Trzaskowski.

It is, in an odd way, rather helpful for the Prime Minister to have someone complain about his proposals at this stage as he does not want to appear to be suggesting something so easy and small that he doesn’t even need to work at persuading his EU counterparts to accept it. Cameron wants to emerge from the renegotiation with his own powers of persuasion vindicated and so right now that Polish red line is pretty handy – so long as it turns out to be the sort of red line that Barack Obama likes saying he’s drawn rather than one that it really is impossible to cross.

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