The British PM vs. the European Union? No, not really

i) Protection of the single market for Britain and other non-euro countries.
ii) Boosting competitiveness by setting a target for the reduction of the “burden” of red tape.
iii) Exempting Britain from “ever-closer union” and bolstering national parliaments.
iv) Restricting EU migrants’ access to in-work benefits such as tax credits.
i) and ii) above are vague beyond comprehension. Deliberately so, of course. (Has any European politician ever argued against cutting red tape?) As for iii). It can justifiably be said that the very nature of the EU (along with its principles and laws) is designed to bring about an “ever-closer union” between the EU’s central institutions and national parliaments. Finally, iv) is a no-no because it infringes fundamental European law on the “free movement of peoples”.
 
So not only are those four claims vague and unachievable, Lord Lawson also said that they’re “disappointingly unambitious”.
 
Just how difficult Cameron’s task is can be shown by the simple fact that in order to bring about radical change he’d need the cooperation of the other 27 European Union countries. Now of course some of those countries do indeed benefit from the EU – specifically when it comes inter-European immigration (including emigrating to the UK). So that’s a few countries which would say ‘no’ to start off with.
 
What’s more, a spokesman for the Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, said that talk about cutting benefits is “highly problematic” because it impacted on “fundamental freedoms of our internal market”. In addition, it added up to “direct discrimination between EU citizens”.
As David Cameron, the British people and the EU’s unelected bureaucracy all know, any talk about doing something radical and concrete about immigration is basically just that – talk.Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond exemplified this all-talk-no-action facade when he said that the the government is indeed open to ideas about how to reduce immigration. Yes, open to ideas and ideas alone. That is, open to more talk and little (or no) action.
 
You know these forthcoming discussions are a “gimmick” when you take on board what the European Commission has said about them. It says that any changes in benefits for immigrants would break free-movement laws. In non-EU speak, that means that they will break these laws because it’s the European Commission itself that helped create them in the first place.
 
Cameron himself tacitly admits that there can (or will) be no change on immigration when he said the following:

So there’s very little room for manoeuvre – even when it comes to the fact that 40% of recent EU-area immigrants – even some they have jobs – receive (on average) £6,000 a year in state benefits. Put simply, the fact that some actually have jobs is almost immediately cancelled out by that £6,000 a year of benefits they receive.