Earlier, Poland’s Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski called Cameron’s plans to limit welfare benefits to migrant workers, which include hundreds of thousands of Poles, “a point of contention”.
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Polish prime minster Beata Szydlo said she did not see “eye to eye” with Mr Cameron on the issue but wanted Britain to remain in the EU.
After talks in Bucharest with the Romanian president, Mr Cameron said he was “confident” of reaching a deal on his four key renegotiation aims.
“If we were outside the European Union we would still be very affected by the migration crisis coming out of Syria and Africa”, Mr Cameron said.
Mr Cameron has conceded a deal will not be reached on the UK’s objectives before Christmas.
The comment was widely interpreted as an indication that concessions may be needed from the Prime Minister, who has himself said that he is “open to different ways of dealing with this issue”.
The OBR has been quite handy of late: if it didn’t exist as an independent organisation, George Osborne would have found it much harder to explain how he’d found £27bn to make his life easier in the spending review. A net migration rate in Britain of “well over 300,000 a year…is not sustainable”, he said.
In a hardening of his warning that Britain could vote to leave in his planned referendum, Mr Cameron said the problems in the eurozone and the migration crisis could lead people to think: ‘Oh Christ, push Europe away from me, it’s bringing me problems’.
Cameron promised to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the European Union before a referendum in 2016.
“The EU has shown before it has the sensibility to respond to the concerns of member states”.
Britain’s request that European Union migrants must contribute for four years before they qualify for benefits has proved the most contentious of his proposals for European Union reform, with some countries branding the proposal discriminatory.
Officials close the United Kingdom negotiation told The Telegraph that Mr Cameron was sticking to his core demands on the issue – including change to the EU treaties – despite warnings from Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, that there was “no consensus” on the issue.
“The short-term reaction can be ‘Get me out of here.’ The longer-term reaction is ‘We must find a better way of working with our partners because we share the same challenges, ‘” he added.
“This renegotiation, this question has become bigger and more important with the security crisis that we face in Europe”, Cameron said.
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“In terms of benefits access, there is not full agreement between us at the moment but we will continue to discuss this in the future”, said Szydło.
