David Cameron has rounded on Eurosceptic Conservative colleagues over their plan to severely limit EU migration, saying it would lead to a tit-for-tat response from Brussels that would hit Britons planning to work abroad.
The prime minister is desperate to stop the Vote Leave camp exploiting public concern about immigration to build up momentum in the final three weeks of the EU referendum campaign.
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, the two Conservative frontmen for the Leave campaign, have said Britain should “take back control” of its borders and end the automatic right of EU workers to come to the UK.
But Mr Cameron’s allies said the proposed alternative — replacing free movement with an “Australian-style” points system, treating EU citizens in the same way as any other country — was “straight out of the United Kingdom Independence party manifesto”.
Mr Cameron said: “If we were to say to Europeans they needed work permits to come to Britain, European countries would say to us we would need work permits to go there.”
The point was amplified by Mark Rutte, Dutch prime minister and an ally of Mr Cameron, who said it would be “unavoidable” that other countries would retaliate with work restrictions, leading to “a race to the bottom”.
An ICM poll this week put the Leave side ahead by 52 to 48 per cent, excluding “don’t knows”, putting a spring in the step of Mr Johnson and Mr Gove as they toured the country. The FT’s poll of polls gives Remain a 46 to 43 per cent lead, with the rest undecided.
Mr Cameron has grown frustrated at the sight of senior colleagues setting out what looks like an alternative manifesto for government following what they hope will be a vote to Leave on June 23. “They are not the prime minister or chancellor,” said one ally of Mr Cameron. “They are offering a hypothetical manifesto they can’t deliver.”
The tension is magnified by the fact that if Mr Cameron loses the referendum, many Tories believe he will be forced to quit, with Mr Johnson a strong contender to replace him.
Mr Johnson denied setting out his own prospectus for power. “All we are saying is what any government could do, and we are saying after we vote leave on June 23 it will be up to the government to take back control,” he said.
The former London mayor wants Britain to choose its immigrants according to criteria set at Westminster, including an English-language test for people applying to do certain jobs. But lawyers warned that extending the points-based system currently applied to non-EU migrants to European nationals would be highly bureaucratic and would add to the costs for businesses hiring from abroad.
Vince Cable, former business secretary, said: “Under that system, officials and bureaucrats would be second-guessing the labour market.” Remain campaigners argue that Australia has more immigration per capita than Britain.
They are not the prime minister or chancellor. They are offering a hypothetical manifesto they can’t deliver
Applying a points-based system to EU nationals hoping to work in Britain would disrupt a fluid European labour market; in the first quarter of 2016, some 2.2m EU nationals were working in Britain.
Under the Vote Leave plan those EU citizens already working legally in Britain would not be affected. Any EU response would probably not therefore hit the estimated 800,000 Britons already working in other EU countries.
The restrictions to be placed on British workers would be decided later, but one Brussels official who would be involved in any talks said there would be a tit-for-tat response. “There cannot be a better deal for Britain,” the official said.
The government has already labelled an existing immigration regime for non-EU workers as an Australian-style system that lets in workers according to skills criteria and earnings limits. The Leave camp’s latest announcement would probably mean an extension of that scheme or one that is similar.
But John Hayes, principal at Constantine Law Limited, said the proposed scheme would significantly increase costs for employers and require hundreds if not thousands of additional civil servants and border agents.
His firm charges employers about £1,500 per application for every non-EU worker that comes to the UK, but associated costs — such advertising for the job and demonstrating to the government that there is no alternative but to hire from abroad — would result in the “doubling or tripling of that figure”.
There is also uncertainty how the existing “tier 3” system for low-skilled workers would operate in practice given that it has never been activated because at present those jobs are taken by EU workers.
Madeleine Sumption, of Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, said any government seeking to control unskilled immigrant labour would probably have to adopt a programme similar to the seasonal agricultural scheme, in which employers sponsor workers to come from outside the EU. It was dropped in the mid-2000s when the government decided the jobs could be filled by European workers.