The British Prime Minister has set off on a last-minute tour of intensive diplomacy to try and secure a renegotiation package for Britain’s membership of the bloc.
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Earlier Thursday, Mr. Cameron, speaking in Germany, said Britain supports the concept of free movement but not the abuse of it.
The influential far right Jobbik party urged Orbán to strike an alliance with Cameron to in its words “recover Hungary’s national sovereignty”.
“BMW Group has invested over £1.75 billion in the United Kingdom since the year 2000 across its four manufacturing plants and sources £1.2 billion worth of goods and services from United Kingdom suppliers annually”, BMW’s director for sales and marketing Ian Robertson said in Munich.
I’m still firmly of the opinion that the European Union referendum falls into the category of promises the Conservatives made at the last General Election that they anticipated would be negotiated away in coalition talks.
There have also been notable changes in Italy, where 42 percent now want to leave the European Union compared with 25 percent a year ago and in Belgium, the proportion has grown to 33 percent from 25 percent.
Marr asked: “If you lose the referendum, do you stay as prime minister?”
Cameron’s challenge is made more hard by his country’s historic ambivalence towards the continent.
He said: “If the court [EU] agreed that Britain was still discriminating against migrant workers, this could be portrayed by the losing side as a con, and that we voted to stay in Europe on a false premise”.
“Britain supports the concept of free movement”.
He went on: “Britain and Germany are key allies in creating a prosperous and secure EU”.
“Hungarians contribute well to the British economy so they shouldn’t accept discrimination”, Orban said.
Against EU assumption is developing in some different countries, including Italy and Belgium, yet the safeguarded Greeks are more probable now to see their future inside Europe than a year prior. British officials say ideas for a possible compromise are not fixed. “Secondly, there is an economic argument that makes people more skeptical”, he concluded.
Orban, criticized in the EU for his outspoken opposition to admitting refugees and his embrace of “illiberal democracy” at home, was Cameron’s only ally in a failed 2014 attempt to block the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker as European Commission president. If he can convince voters he is campaigning for membership of a genuinely “reformed” European Union he will have won half the battle.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, an ally of Cameron’s whose country holds the bloc’s rotating presidency for the next six months, said he was “relatively optimistic” that a deal could be reached at the mid-February meeting.
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But now the Government has been accused of silencing eurosceptic MPs.
