Michael Gove warns that EU expansion will open our borders to 88million from Europe’s poorest countries. Albania is on course to join the European Union — alongside four other countries, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. The already unwieldy group of 28 is due to become a throng of 33. You imagine a story with political intrigue, huge sums of money going astray, criminality and double-dealing. And you’d be right, report “Daily Mail” , trasnmete the National Information Agency “Presheva Jonë”-
But the Albanian Option isn’t holiday reading fiction — it’s diplomatic fact.bAnd Britain isn’t just backing this move. We’re paying for it.
Every week we send £350 million to the EU. And now millions of your hard-earned taxes are being directed to these five prospective members.
Between now and 2020 the United Kingdom will pay almost £2 billion to help these nations prepare for membership of the EU — that’s more than we will spend on the NHS Cancer Drugs Fund over the same period.
This bounty will be our greatest gift to Albania since the comic talent of the late Sir Norman Wisdom, that country’s improbable national hero, lit up the dark days of Stalinist dictatorship.
Indeed, I wonder if the Albanian people are now convinced that Britain’s Foreign Office is full of Norman Wisdom characters, lovable chumps whose generosity and good-heartedness make them easily gulled into accepting all sorts of bad advice.
How else could they explain their good fortune in being on the receiving end of a £2 billion Balkan bonanza?
Many British people will ask why, if we have billions to spare, it isn’t being spent on UK schools and hospitals rather than Albania and Montenegro.
But what makes this expenditure particularly difficult to defend is the fact that we are not just paying to help Albanians and Montenegrins in their own country.
We are actually paying to give the people of Albania and Montenegro unfettered access to the UK’s public services.
EU citizens enjoy the right to live and work in any member state — it’s a freedom the EU’s elites consider essential to the working of their union. We saw in the Prime Minister’s recent attempts to renegotiate our EU membership the absolute determination of other EU leaders to protect this right.
But while it suits the EU establishment to allow so many millions to move to the UK, that freedom for others means problems for our own citizens.
What’s interesting is that it has been thinkers on the Left — people whose whole lives have been devoted to supporting the most disadvantaged in our society — who have been ringing the alarm bell this week about the consequences of unfettered free movement.
So when he speaks out, we know it’s because he is worried about the impact of the free movement of millions on the institutions which build social solidarity and protect the weakest.
As Frank points out, our hospitals and schools are facing growing strains because of our EU membership.
When Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey join the EU, another 88 million people will soon be eligible for NHS care and school places for their children. And what will even more immigration from the EU mean for access to housing across the UK? How many more homes will we need and how many more green acres will go? What will it mean for jobs and wages?
Can we maintain the apprenticeships we need, safeguard the jobs of the future and ensure people can maintain a decent standard of living, when up to 88 million people from nations much poorer than our own will have the right to live and work here?
As we introduce the National Living Wage, the pull of the UK could prove irresistible.
Even for those with jobs in Albania, average incomes are just one seventh of those in the UK. The figure for Serbia is less than one fifth.
