Major puts chance of UK leaving EU at 50 per cent

BRITAIN is likely to leave the EU unless it allows us to restrict immigration, Sir John Major warned last night.

In an extraordinary intervention, the former prime minister said ‘our small island cannot absorb’ the huge numbers moving here each year.

Sir John, who declared as premier that he wanted Britain at the heart of the EU, claimed our chances of leaving the union were ‘just under 50 per cent’ – and warned this would increase unless Brussels reforms rules on freedom of movement.

He said that although the country welcomed hard-working migrants, the ‘sheer scale of the influx’ had put ‘strains on our health, welfare, housing and education services’.

Britain had accepted ‘one of, if not the largest population movement in peacetime European history’, he told an audience in Germany, adding that failure to tackle the trend would cause ‘huge public disquiet’.

‘It is a matter of numbers,’ he said. ‘Whereas some European

‘We are close to a breach

populations are falling, the UK has grown by 7 per cent in a decade.’

More than a million people have entered Britain from Poland and seven other former Eastern bloc countries since 2004.

Sir John, the last Tory leader to win a Commons majority, also launched a strong attack on Ukip, saying: ‘I hope we are going to push them back to the fringes of politics from which they should never have emerged.’

The Tory grandee – whose remarks were shown to and discussed with Downing Street in advance – sketched out David Cameron’s plan to negotiate looser ties with Brussels.

He said: ‘I ask our European partners to realise we are close to a breach that is in no one’s interest.’

Labour leader Ed Miliband warned that leaving the EU would be a ‘disaster’ and said that Sir John’s speech was a ‘damning indictment’ of the prime minister, who was ‘burning bridges and not helping Britain in Europe’.