European Council

David Burrowes Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)]

May I take the Prime Minister back to another election commitment? In 2014, he and I, along with thousands of Conservative activists, campaigned on a promise, which was emblazoned across our leaflets, to restore control of our borders. The Prime Minister followed that up in the same year, saying that

“I will go to Brussels, I will not take no for an answer and when it comes to free movement: I will get what Britain needs.”

What changed last week?

[The Prime Minister]

What changed last week is that we are reforming free movement to make sure that we can keep out fraudsters, criminals and those peddling sham marriages, and to make sure that we can apply British rules to foreign nationals coming in as European citizens, just as we do to our own citizens. There are a whole set of changes. To be fair to the Home Secretary, she negotiated incredibly hard, knowing that this was the one moment in which we had the ability to make these changes—reversing European Court of Justice judgments—and to reform free movement, and that is exactly what we have done.