As I knock on people’s doors and chat to people in the street, the issue of immigration and our EU membership comes up the whole time. On EU membership, they ask why we can’t have a referendum right now. The answer is simple.
In order to hold a referendum, there needs to be an Act of Parliament to deliver it. That is the law. Whilst the Conservative Party is absolutely committed to a referendum – it’s one of the reasons I got into politics, to give people the say on their membership of the EU – the Liberal Democrats, our coalition partners, have said they will not support having one. The same with the Labour Party. This means when we, the Conservatives, try to bring forward a government bill to hold a referendum, the Liberal Democrats simply block it. There is nothing we can do about a bill in government time. So we are bringing forward a private members’ bill that will ask a future government to hold a referendum in 2017. But Labour and Lib Dems have said they will not hold that referendum (no parliament can bind a subsequent t government to any course of action). So no referendum before May 2015 and the only way to guarantee a referendum after the election is with a majority Conservative government.
Immigration is a more complex issue. It takes three forms. Non EU migration, from outside Europe, has been successfully capped and numbers are down. Asylum seekers, the second form, continue to be less of a serious problem and there are international laws surrounding their right to stay. But with EU migration, the issues are more complex. Of course, many Britons enjoy the freedom of movement laws that allow around 2 million British people to live, work and retire on the continent. But what worries people is that we see EU immigration coming to this country.
To a greater extent, we are a victim of our own success. We have created, in this country, more jobs than the rest of the EU combined. People from poorer countries will come to the UK seeking work. When we signed up to these rules, there were 9 member states; there are now 28 and many much poorer than the UK. The dynamics have changed and that is why David Cameron will be arguing hard for a cap on EU migration to the UK.