Benefits should not be topping up migrants’ wages
DID ANY politician ever make such a foolish promise as David Cameron’s vow to reduce net migration to the UK to fewer than 100,000 a year by 2015, “no ifs, no buts”? Surely he and his advisers could see that it was doomed from the beginning. Short of leaving the EU, or at least renegotiating the Treaty of Rome, we can do nothing to prevent members of other EU states exercising their right to come to Britain to look for work.
Given that the Prime Minister has not offered to hold an in/ out EU referendum until 2017, how on earth was he ever going to achieve his target?
It was left to Home Secretary Theresa May yesterday to make the official admission that net immigration will be about 240,000 next year, two- and- ahalf times what had been promised. We will be getting quite a few “ifs” and “buts” over the next few months.
As the eurosceptic think tank Open Europe argued yesterday Cameron was on completely the wrong track when he made his promise. Rather than setting himself up for failure by making an arbitrary target for migration he should have attacked the problem at source: by reining in the benefits system that has been sucking in workers from Eastern Europe.
There is nothing in the EU treaties which says you have to offer migrant workers welfare payments to bump up their earnings to way in excess of that which they could earn in their home countries. Britain is virtually alone in having in- work benefits which are universal and do not require claimants to build up entitlement through their taxes.
IT IS one thing paying tax credits to people who have been resident in Britain and have been paying taxes for years. It is quite another dangling handouts in front of foreign workers who are thinking of coming to Britain. When paid to migrant workers tax credits are just a subsidy for low- paying employers.
An EU migrant worker on the national minimum wage in Britain will earn £ 196.51 a week after tax. This is then bumped up by £ 93.77 of tax credits, making a total of £ 290.28.
The extra money hugely