All EU leaders opposed to restricting benefits

The unelected president of the EU Council, Donald Tusk, has told MEPs that every EU member state is opposed to restricting in-work benefits for EU immigrants and that David Cameron will have to give up on the idea.

It also looks like he's got to wait until February to see what bones he's going to be tossed to spin into a "victory" after Angela Merkel phoned him up and told him it's not going to happen before Christmas.

Cameron told he will have to compromise on immigrant benefits compromise

The unelected president of the EU Commission, Donald Tusk, has told David Cameron that there are "substantial political differences" over his "demand" to prevent in-work benefits being paid to EU immigrants for the first 4 years that they live here.

Faced with the impossibility of EU countries agreeing to end open borders and determined to keep us in the EU, the only option Cameron has is to make the UK less attractive to benefits tourists. He has "demanded" the right to stop in-work benefits (but not out of work benefits like child benefit, unemployment benefit, housing benefit, disability benefits, etc) for EU immigrants for the first four years they live here. Bizarrely, Cameron's immigration compromise is designed to make the UK less attractive to people coming here to work and more attractive to people coming here just to claim benefits.

This is already a pathetically weak compromise that fails to address the underlying problem - free movement of people - and the expectation is that further compromises to the compromise will have to be made. It's difficult to understand what further compromises can be made without rendering the whole thing completely pointless rather than largely ineffectual as it is now.

Image credit: Guido

Cameron told AGAIN that he can't restrict benefits for EU immigrants

The leaders of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have told David Cameron that they will block his futile attempts to stop immigrants claiming benefits until they've paid into the system for four years.

Although curbing immigration still remains one of Cameron's key promises despite spectacularly failing to prevent it rocketing over the last few years, he has dropped it from the list of "demands" for his sham renegotiation. He is instead pathetically trying to discourage people from wanting to move here by making them wait for benefits rather than defy the EU.

More than £130m per year paid in child benefit to EU immigrants

Immigrants from the EU are claiming £27m in child benefit for their children who live overseas every year which contributes to a child benefit bill for EU immigrants of over £130m.

EU immigrants are given preferential treatment over immigrants from the Commonwealth and the rest of the world, being allowed to move here in unlimited numbers and have the same entitlement to benefits as people already living here. Someone moving here from Australia or India, for example, would have to prove that they had the means to support themselves before they were given permission to move here. Someone from the EU merely has to get on a plane and fly over here and if they claim to be self employed, can claim benefits from the day set foot in the country.

The right to claim benefits for family members that live in another EU country is one that is guaranteed under EU law and makes a mockery of the claims made by supporters of mass immigration that immigrants made a positive contribution to the economy.

Labour PPC for Truro forced to stand down for overclaiming benefits

The Labour PPC for Truro has been forced to stand down after accidentally claiming too much housing and other related benefits.

Hanna Toms says she thought that telling HMRC of changes to her income (presumably for tax credits) would filter down to her local council who administer housing benefit. Such joined up thinking is unheard of in the public sector, Ignorance is no defence, Toms should have known better.

Guardian validates UKIP's concerns over immigrant benefits

The Guardian have helpfully verified that the UK is keeping far more than our fair share of people on benefits.

Research by the Guardian has found that 29k UK nationals are claiming unemployment benefits in other EU countries but almost 69k EU immigrants are claiming unemployment benefits here. The Guardian have tried to spin the statistics to support unlimited immigration by cherry picking the facts they want readers to pay attention to and ignoring the inconvenient truths.

According to the Guardian's figures, there are 29,095 UK nationals claiming unemployment benefits in other EU member states. That's an average of 1.078 unemployment benefit claimants for each of the other 27 EU member states. At the same time, there were 64,830 EU immigrants claiming unemployment benefits in the UK. That's 6000% more unemployment benefit claimants from the EU claiming in the UK than unemployment benefit claimants from the UK claiming in the EU. There are more people from Portugal and Poland claiming unemployment benefits in the UK than there are people from the UK claiming unemployment benefits in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden combined.

Of course, unemployment benefits are just a small part of the problem. There are no statistics on people claiming child benefits and tax credits but we know that £600k a week is being paid out in child benefit to people living in other EU member states with three quarters of that going to people living in Poland. There are also no statistics on how many people who already live in the UK are claiming unemployment benefits because they can't find a job because most new jobs go to newly arrived immigrants.

Uncontrolled immigration from the EU has been bad for the economy and bad for society. There have apparently been 2m private sector jobs created in the last 4 years. A lot of those are part time jobs but it's still hundreds of thousands of full time equivalent jobs. There are 1.9m unemployed people living in the UK and there shouldn't be. Jobs are being created but most of them aren't taken by unemployed people already living here, they're being taken by newly arrived immigrants. The more people there are on benefits, the higher taxes need to be to pay for them and the less money people have to spend stimulating the economy and creating more jobs.

EU court rules that Turkish workers must get the same UK benefits as EU citizens

The British government has lost another court case aimed at preventing EU rights being extended to people who aren't EU citizens.

Last week the EU Court of Injustice ruled that it was against EU law to impose immigration controls on the partners of EU citizens even if they aren't EU citizens themselves. It transpires that they also ruled that every Turkish worker in the UK is entitled to the same benefits as EU citizens, including the right to transfer their state pension benefits back to Turkey.

Earlier this month, David Cameron pledged to fight for Turkey to join the EU and give 75m Turks the right to live and work in the UK.

Are you listening Prime Minister?

There are only 35 days left until 30m of the poorest people in the EU are able to live and work in the UK in unlimited numbers.

So far, over 20k people have signed a petition calling on the British government to indefinitely suspend the abolition of border controls for Romania and Bulgaria due to come into force on 1st January.

In 2014, border restrictions on people coming from Bulgaria and Romania will be relaxed. This will mean nationals from these countries will be equally entitled to jobs, housing and welfare benefits. It will put pressure on our housing, infrastructure, schools, and healthcare at a time when the government is cutting pensions, jobs, public services and the armed forces.

I request that the government suspends indefinitely the relaxing of the UK's border restrictions due to take place on 1 January 2014.

David Cameron has clearly realised too late how much public opinion is against him on immigration because he's announced changes to the benefits system for EU immigrants which he says will send a clear message that we're not a soft touch. The changes he's announced are making EU immigrants wait 3 months before they are entitled to benefits, limit unemployment benefits to 6 months unless the claimant has a genuine chance of a job, making them wait for housing benefit and deporting EU immigrants who are caught begging or sleeping rough.

The problem with Cast Iron Dave's master plan is that it's not achievable.  EU immigrants claiming to be self employed are allowed to claim benefits from the day they arrive, Big Issue sellers are self employed and EU law says that EU immigrants are entitled to the same benefits as the natives of the country they move to.  The EU Commission is currently taking the British government to one of its kangaroo courts to enforce this law so claiming to be able to limit the benefits that EU immigrants are entitled to is simply dishonest.

EU Commission suing UK over benefits restrictions

The EU Commission is taking legal action against the UK for making it too hard for EU immigrants to claim benefits.

They are claiming that the "right to reside" test illegally discriminates against EU citizens by making it harder for them to claim benefits than a UK citizen even though the test is applied to UK citizens moving back to the country after living abroad.

Iain Duncan Smith says that the British government will fight the EU Commission so expect a cave-in pretty soon.

EU says no to restricting benefits for immigrants

Has anyone got a plan "B"?

The EU has blown a hole in Cast Iron Dave's plans to stop immigrants from getting access to benefits unless they've lived in the country for 5 years.

EU Commission spokesman, Jonathon Todd, has told Dave that they'll be scrutinising his plans to make sure they don't discriminate against EU citizens.  The EU's definition of discrimination against EU citizens is not having the same rights as the "natives".

Once again, UKIP is confirmed as the only party willing to do what needs to be done to crack down on economic immigration.

Checking if people are eligible for benefits is illegal

The EU Commission has decided that checking if people claiming benefits are actually allowed to live in this country and claim benefits is illegal.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of state for the DWP EU administrator for social security, said:

[This] could mean the British taxpayer paying out over £2bn extra a year in benefits to people who have no connection to our country and who have never paid in a penny in tax.

The EU settlement is supposed to protect the right of member states to make their own social security arrangements.

But we are now seeing a rising tide of judgements from the European institutions using other legal avenues to erode away these rights, and we should be gravely concerned.

So what's he going to do about?  Is he going to tell the EU Commission to bog off?  Is he going to tell them it's up to us who we give our money to?  No, he's going to tell the media how damaging it is to our economy and how the EU is damaging our country and then continue representing the pro-EU Conservatives in their pro-EU government.

Unemployed people can't survive on £24k per year tax free?

A letter from Eric Pickles to David Cameron has been leaked claiming that up to 20,000 people could be made homeless and another 20,000 forced to move if the ConDems go ahead with plans to cap benefits at £500 per week.

Erm, £200 per week?  £2,000+ per month (£24,000 per year) tax free for not working and people might not be able to live on it?  What sort of lifestyle does someone have to live to be able to spend more than £500 per week without any of the expense of going to work?  The median average wage in the UK is £499 per week and 32% of that goes to the taxman in Income Tax and National Insurance to pay people not to work.  If someone working full time and earning the national average wage can survive on ~£388 per week after tax, why can't an unemployed person manage on 25% more than that?

The problem here isn't the amount of benefits someone gets paid, it's the amount of people on benefits.  Iain Duncan Smith's laughable plea to companies to employ young people from this country rather than cheap immigrants last week shows that he understands the problem but of course the British government's hands are tied because of the EU.

Cheap foreign labour is abundant because anyone from an EU member state is allowed to come and live and work here.  Average wages in some eastern European countries are 20% of what they are here so it pays to move over here, send money home and you can even claim benefits for the family you've left behind at our expense.  And then there's non-EU immigration which we aren't allowed to cap because the EU said it was illegal.

Giving money away for not working isn't the answer.  People need jobs so they can support themselves without needing a big chunk of everyone else's wages to pay their bills.  There are 2.5m unemployed people in the UK at the moment and 400,000 jobs were created in the last year.  That should have taken the unemployment figure down to 2.1m and saved the taxpayer a good £8bn off the social security bill.  With that extra money in peoples' pockets they could have been spending more and stimulating the economy which creates more jobs but instead 87% of those jobs were taken by immigrants leaving the unemployment rate largely unchanged.

Cheap foreign labour might seem like a good idea to businesses but it's a false economy.  The more unemployed people there are, the more tax the British government needs to pay for them.  The more tax employees pay, the more employers have to pay.  The more money the British government needs, the more tax it will attempt to extract from companies.

UKIP policy is to freeze all economic immigration for 5 years and then introduce a points-based system to ensure we only get immigrants with skills that we need.  This doesn't affect genuine asylum seekers who would continue to be allowed into the country to protect them from danger in their own country.  A 5 year freeze on immigration would allow people already living here to take up the available jobs that are mostly going to immigrants and to house people who already live here.  There aren't enough jobs or houses to go around the people who already live in this country, we don't need immigration.

Cutting child benefit is simply not an "attack".

Shock, horror, even the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror are united in their alarm at child benefit being cut for people earning over £44,000 per year.

Labour's line seems to be that this is an attack. What they seem to not understand is that saving taxpayer's money on things like this means it frees up the money to be spent elsewhere, like on schools, hospitals or helping to reduce the nation's deficit which simply must be done.

Those who oppose cutting the benefit for those earning so much need to get real. Most people I speak to (who aren't dirt poor) who receive the benefit don't require it for their children - it's used as an extra bonus. One that British taxpayer's can no longer afford to pay out.