European Council

Tim Farron Excerpts

Monday 19th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I cannot put an exact timetable on when the negotiations will be concluded. Obviously the House of Commons knows that we must have the referendum come what may by the end of 2017, but I do not want to put a timetable on how long it is going to take to complete this negotiation. I am confident that we will make good progress and I will update the House regularly.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

The decision by some Governments in Europe to close borders has severely impacted their neighbours, thus exacerbating the humanitarian crisis, so will the Prime Minister call on Viktor Orban of Hungary and others to reopen borders and engage in meaningful discussion to tackle this growing crisis, or is there no point because the Prime Minister’s refusal to take a single one of the 600,000 refugees in Europe has destroyed his credibility among Europe’s leaders?

[The Prime Minister]

First of all, what actually happens at these European Councils is not Britain coming under pressure for the approach we have taken. People respect the fact that we are not part of Schengen and that we have made a decision about taking refugees from out of the camps, and above all people respect the fact that we spend on some occasions 10 times more than other European countries of our size on the refugee aid programme to Syria—for the Syrian refugee camps and the neighbouring countries. That is the right thing to do.

As for Europe’s external borders, they are not my responsibility. I will leave Viktor Orban to defend himself, but the point that the Hungarian Prime Minister and others make is that Europe has an external border and needs to prove that it has an external border to ensure that people do not believe it is a risk-free, easy journey to go to the EU. However, that is a matter for them. We have an external border; it is at Calais and that is the border that we will properly police.