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Perante as ameaças anti-europeias que se desenham no
horizonte nas Eleições Europeias, os “Partidos Clássicos” tendem a integrar rápidamente
facetas dos programas dos Partidos Extremistas e Nacionalistas nas suas acções,
tentando assim gerir os estragos e neutralizar/integrando, as “essências” dos mesmos Partidos.
Perante uma Esquerda que se perdeu em “sofisticamentos”
ideológicos e na “ourivesaria” ideológica das questões fracturantes, (o “Povo”),
a “Classe Operária” e a Classe Média, que sucumbiram ao Consumismo, trocando a
sua Identidade e Valores pelo caminho da
“Abundância” a crédito, sentem-se agora não representadas e manipuladas por um Capitalismo feroz/
Neo Liberal e sem Humanismo.
Há pois, mais de que razões, para estarmos preocupados com o
Futuro do Sonho da Europa e pela
incapacidade da Classe Política e dos Líderes actuais na UE, fechados numa
EuroBurocracia cinzentona, cara e
ineficaz, em comunicar com o exterior e respectivos cidadãos.
António Sérgio Rosa de Carvalho.
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Por
27/11/2013 - in Público
O acesso ao subsídio de habitação e de desemprego no Reino Unido vai ter mais entraves para os imigrantes a partir de Janeiro, segundo os projectos de David Cameron. UE critica posição de Londres.imigrantes dos países da União Europeia (UE) no Reino Unido vão ter a vida mais dificultada. Esse é pelo menos o desejo expressado esta terça-feira pelo primeiro-ministro, David Cameron, que quer restringir o acesso dos novos imigrantes a algumas prestações sociais. A UE considera o discurso de Cameron uma “lamentável reacção exagerada”.
É neste sentido que Cameron anunciou, num artigo no Financial Times, que pretende alterar a lei de Imigração, obrigando os novos imigrantes comunitários no Reino Unido a esperar três meses até poderem aceder ao subsídio de desemprego. Da mesma forma, os imigrantes recém-chegados também não vão poder aceder a subsídios de habitação e terão de apresentar rendimentos a partir de um certo valor para poderem ter direito a apoios sociais.
Qualquer cidadão comunitário encontrado a dormir nas ruas ou a pedir será deportado e impedido de regressar ao Reino Unido durante um ano, “a não ser que possa provar que tenha uma razão válida para voltar, tal como um trabalho”, escreveu Cameron.
Para o primeiro-ministro britânico, “o movimento livre [de pessoas na UE] deu origem a grandes movimentações populacionais que causaram grandes disparidades de rendimento. Está a extrair talento de países que precisam de manter as suas melhores pessoas e coloca pressão nas comunidades”, considerou Cameron. É seguindo esta lógica que uma das propostas do governo britânico é a fixação de um nível mínimo de PIB per capita para que sejam levantadas as restrições fronteiriças a um país.
O pacote legislativo conta com o apoio dos parceiros de coligação dos conservadores, o Partido Liberal Democrata. Para o vice-primeiro-ministro, Nick Clegg, “estas medidas são sensatas e razoáveis e permitem assegurar que o direito a trabalhar não dá automaticamente o direito a pedir”. “Outros países da UE já adoptaram políticas semelhantes e estão a considerar ir mais longe. Acesso ilimitado a benefícios nos Estados-membros não existe simplesmente”, acrescentou o líder pró-europeu dos Liberais Democratas, citado pelo The Guardian.
É na bancada conservadora que se encontram as maiores críticas à reforma legislativa. O Guardian refere que pelo menos 40 deputados tories preferiam medidas mais duras, como por exemplo a extensão do controlo fronteiriço na Roménia e na Bulgária por mais quatro anos.
A Comissão Europeia defendeu que as declarações de Cameron são um tipo de “retórica unilateral” que não ajuda a resolver o problema do fluxo migratório na Europa. “É um lamentável exagero”, criticou o comissário europeu para o Emprego e Assuntos Sociais, Laszlo Andor, em declarações à BBC Radio. “Precisávamos de uma apresentação da realidade mais acertada, sem ser sob a histeria que por vezes aparece no Reino Unido”, acrescentou. A posição de Downing Street “arrisca-se a apresentar o Reino Unido como uma espécie de país desagradável. Temos de olhar para a situação de um ponto de vista colectivo e actuar proporcionalmente”, concluiu Andor.
Free movement within Europe needs to be less free
By David Cameron / http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/add36222-56be-11e3-ab12-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2lrG0hMkg
Vast migrations extract
talent from countries that need their best people, writes David Cameron
On January 1, the people of
Romania and Bulgaria will have the same right to work in the UK as other EU
citizens. I know many people are deeply concerned about the impact that could
have on our country. I share those concerns.
Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Britain has
championed the case for bringing nations which languished behind the Iron
Curtain into Nato and the EU. That is important to their prosperity and
security – and ours. Britain has also been one of the strongest supporters of a
single market. It is in our interests that it should grow, and for our citizens
to have the opportunity to work in other European countries.
But things have gone wrong. Since 2004, we have witnessed
the biggest migration in Europe outside wartime. In Britain’s case, 1m people
from central and eastern Europe are now living here. So what lessons can be
learned? There is the lesson on transitional controls. In 2004, the Labour
government made the decision that the UK should opt out completely of
transitional controls on the new EU member states. They had the right to impose
a seven-year ban before new citizens could come and work here, but – almost
alone in Europe – Labour refused it. That was a monumental mistake.
There is the lesson on income disparity. It was hardly
surprising that with income per head in the joining countries around half of
the EU average, so many people chose to come here. Yet when Romania and
Bulgaria joined the EU, Labour had not learned the lesson. That was the moment
to address difficult questions about when to allow new entrants full access to
each other’s labour markets – but the Labour government ducked these questions.
That is why this government extended transitional controls on Bulgaria and
Romania from five to the maximum seven years.
The other major lesson was that failures in immigration
policy were closely linked to welfare and education. If it does not pay to
work, or if British people lack skills, that creates a huge space in our labour
market for people from overseas to fill. You cannot blame people for wanting to
come here and work hard; but the real answer lies in training our own people to
fill these jobs. That is what this government is doing: providing record
numbers of apprenticeships, demanding rigour in schools and building a welfare
system that encourages work.
But of course people are most concerned with the action we
are taking now. We are changing the rules so that no one can come to this
country and expect to get out of work benefits immediately; we will not pay
them for the first three months. If after three months an EU national needs
benefits – we will no longer pay these indefinitely. They will only be able to
claim for a maximum of six months unless they can prove they have a genuine
prospect of employment.
We are also toughening up the test which migrants who want
to claim benefits must undergo. This will include a new minimum earnings
threshold. If they don’t pass that test, we will cut off access to benefits
such as income support. Newly arrived EU jobseekers will not be able to claim
housing benefit.
If people are not here to work – if they are begging or
sleeping rough – they will be removed. They will then be barred from re-entry
for 12 months, unless they can prove they have a proper reason to be here, such
as a job. We are also clamping down on those who employ people below the
minimum wage. They will pay the price with a fine of up to £20,000 for every
underpaid employee – more than four times the fine today.
Britain is not acting alone in taking these steps. Other
countries such as the Netherlands already impose a three-month residence
requirement before you can access benefits such as job seekers’ allowance. All
this is what we can legally do within the limits of the treaties Labour signed
up to. But finally, let me set out how my party is planning to prevent these
problems arising in the future.
The EU of today is very different from the EU of 30 years
ago. We need to face the fact that free movement has become a trigger for vast
population movements caused by huge disparities in income. That is extracting
talent out of countries that need to retain their best people and placing
pressure on communities. It is time for a new settlement which recognises that
free movement is a central principle of the EU, but it cannot be a completely
unqualified one. We are not the only country to see free movement as a
qualified right: interior ministers from Austria, Germany and the Netherlands
have also said this to the European Commission.
So Britain, as part of our plan to reform the EU, will now
work with others to return the concept of free movement to a more sensible
basis.
And we need to do the same with welfare. For example, free
movement should not be about exporting child benefit – I want to work with our
European partners to address this.
Bringing new countries in to give them peace and prosperity
remains one of the EU’s greatest strengths. It will be many years, perhaps a
decade, before another country joins. It cannot be done on the same basis as it
was in the past. We must put in place new arrangements that will slow full
access to each other’s labour markets until we can be sure it will not cause
vast migrations.
There are various ways we could achieve this. One would be
to require a new country to reach a certain income or economic output per head
before full free movement was allowed. Individual member states could be freed
to impose a cap if their inflow from the EU reached a certain number in a
single year.
The EU needs to change if it is to regain the trust of its
peoples. I look forward to working with other countries who also want reform –
and to putting the choice about our future in Europe in a referendum. If I am
prime minister after the next election, the British people will have their say.
The writer is UK prime minister
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David Cameron this morning. 'Every time a minister announces
a clampdown on access to benefits … they also chip away at the delicate tissue
of mutual obligation that sustains social cohesion.' Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP
Urgent question on EU migration – Analysis Urgent question
on EU migration - Analysis: The urgent question is over. In policy terms, it
was not revealing at all. But as a snapshot of where political opinion stands
on the immigration issue, it was very telling. Apart from the odd brave soul
(Julian Huppert and Simon Hughes were the two I recall), it seems as if there
is no one left in the Commons willing to defend immigration from Eastern
Europe. Labour MPs and Conservative MPs were broadly in the same place, calling
for tougher controls. The only significant split was between the Tory faction
who want the government to defy EU law completely, and retain the transitional
controls on Bulgarians and Romanians that lapse in January, and mainstream
Conservatives and Labour, who are not advocating going that far. Theresa May,
the home secretary, was siding with the mainstream - but only just; she seemed
curiously reluctant to rule out defying the EU on this. Only a few years ago a
Commons debate on immigration would have sounded very different. On this issue,
political thinking has shifted quite dramatically.
I'll post a summary soon.
Politics live blog / guardian/ by Andrew Sparrow
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Cameron's 'benefit tourism' crackdown is fact-free
political rhetoric
Voters will love Cameron's
plan to restrict migrants' access to benefits, but he's pandering to feelings
rather than dealing with reality
Anne Perkins
theguardian.com, Wednesday 27
November 2013/ http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/27/cameron-benefit-tourism-fact-free-migrants
David Cameron's plan to restrict EU migrants' access to benefits,
which he announced this morning in the Financial Times, perhaps to show a
seriousness of purpose and absolutely no hysterical intent, is going to be a
wow. Voters will love it. Labour will wish they had thought of it (though
Yvette Cooper has been pushing for constraints on benefits for most of the
year). Nick Clegg, the man who promised an amnesty for illegal immigrants at
the last election, says it's a good idea. It's the political jackpot.
But that's all it is. That is what the EU commissioner
László Andor tried to point out when he suggested a fact-based debate would be
a good thing, a debate that acknowledged, for example, that it is the
obligation of the new migrant's native country to pay unemployment benefit.
Debate about migration, however, doesn't take place at any
rational level. It is the most emotive issue in politics today, and every
policy initiative makes that emotional response more rational. People's
attitudes to it can be quite accurately predicted – as OECD research shows – by
income and class. After all, most of us want to be confident that we have
access to a reasonable level of state support if we need it, and we're happy to
pay for it even though it makes a painful hole in the household accounts.
And it is very easy to allow people to believe that there
are others – maybe even their neighbours – who are taking out but aren't paying
in. It's a breach of the very basic code of fairness.
Not that there is any evidence that new migrants are doing
that. But then, there's very little good evidence about migration and migrant
activity at all. Most people think of migrants as a single homogenous group.
Few distinguish between people from the Asian subcontinent, who may be coming
to study or to join family; or from Nigeria (the two biggest non-EU migrant
groups into the UK). It is rarely mentioned (though I may have, several times)
that EU migrants in particular are young, fit and on the whole well educated.
They are less likely to rely on benefits than other groups, at least until they
form families. It is almost never explained that there are several different
ways of measuring immigration – none of which, as MPs pointed out in the
summer, is very reliable. One of the EU commission's complaints about the UK is
a tendency to make assertions about benefit tourism without producing the
evidence to back them up.
Now migration policy is locked into a dangerous bidding war
that makes it harder than ever to question the underlying assumptions, to try
to establish the facts and to get a counter-argument out into the public space.
Recognising that people often feel rather than think about migration is not to
deny that concern about strains on public services and anxiety about housing
shortages and pressure on schools and hospitals, are all entirely legitimate.
But the more politicians announce policy changes and promise impossible targets
(such as the Tory pre-election pledge to cut net migration by more than half),
the more voters feel frustrated and mistrustful. Politicians in turn step up the
rhetoric. And that is where the real danger lies.
Every time a minister announces a clampdown on access to
benefits, or a zero-tolerance attitude to vagrancy – which in Cameron's article
this morning is undoubtedly meant to be read as "Go home, Roma" – they
also chip away at the delicate tissue of mutual obligation that sustains social
cohesion. Every time politicians try to persuade voters that they are
protecting the mutuality that is conferred by citizenship and a national
identity by defining non-members and denying them access, they are in fact
damaging it. But they've set this vicious circle spinning and now there's no
easy way off it.
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