Some 11,222 United Kingdom citizens are claiming the dole in this State, that is some five times as many as Irish citizens claiming in Britain. And yet if one followed the almost hysterical debate in Britain on the alleged scourge of "benefit tourism" one might have a somewhat different perception. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in particular, assisted by a Conservative Party that has never failed to rally to an anti-immigrant resurgence, would have us believe that their country is overrun by welfare scroungers bleeding the state's coffers dry. Indeed, the issue of free movement of people has become the focus of Prime Minister David Cameron's attempts to revise the EU treaties.
A survey by the Guardian newspaper of benefit claimants throughout Europe tells a somewhat different story, one of little comfort to the xenophobes, and which suggests that, on the contrary, it is the British who should be thanking their EU partners for their generosity to welfare recipients, not the other way round.
The survey of 24 EU states finds that as few as one in 40 internal EU migrants are claiming unemployment benefits anyway. And, moreover, that in nine of the wealthier countries – Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, France and Ireland – there are a total of three times as many UK claimants receiving such benefits as nationals of those countries receiving them in the UK.
True, the picture is somewhat different with regard to migrants from the newer member states of central and eastern Europe. But the idea of a “flood” is preposterous propaganda – there are only about 1,000 Romanians and 500 Bulgarians, for example, drawing jobseeker’s allowance in Britain. And Poles? Some 15,000, less that a quarter of the 65,000 EU nationals claiming jobseeker’s allowance in the UK, and half of one per cent of the 2.7 million EU nationals in Britain . Of the 30,000 British claiming dole in other EU states only some 62 are in the 10 countries that have joined since 2004.
It just ain't so, Mr Farage.