Cameron’s last-ditch EU migration plea
“free movement” of people voted to remain in the bloc.
Under the plan, François Hollande, the president of France, Donald Tusk, the European Council president and Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, would all put their names to the joint statement by EU leaders, offering concessions on migration.
However, Mr Cameron’s Remain campaign dropped the idea amid concerns that it would have seemed like a sign of weakness, boosting the Vote Leave camp.
The disclosure, contained in a report from BBC Two’s demonstrates the lengths to which Mr Cameron and potentially other foreign leaders were willing to go to try to keep Britain in the EU. It also shows the extent if Britain to which Mr Cameron feared the Leave campaign’s message of “taking back control” over Britain’s borders to cut migration.
Last night, one of Mr Cameron’s closest allies said the Remain campaign’s biggest failure was the inability to offer voters assurances on migration.
Lord Cooper of Windrush, who was a pollster for the Remain campaign, said: “The people who are very, very concerned about immigration, what they wanted was purely and simply for the UK to be able to have total control of its borders and total control of the flow of people into this country. And we didn’t have an argument that could remotely compete with that.”
Lord Cooper also said a claim by the former chancellor George Osborne, that leaving the EU would cost the average household £4,300-a-year, was dropped because voters “didn’t believe it”.
“The problem with that figure – the £4,300 – was firstly it sounded implausibly large to the ears of most people. Secondly it sounded strangely specific,” he said.
The report emerged as Boris Johnson, one of the leaders of Vote Leave, who is now the Foreign Secretary, said he was confident that Britain would be able to negotiate a Brexit deal that balanced limits on migration with access to the EU’s single market.
The Foreign Secretary, in New York for a meeting of the UN Security Council, said: “I have absolutely no doubt that that balance can be struck and over the next few weeks we’ll be discussing that in the government and with our European friends and partners.”