LONDON: Britain risks being seen as a nasty country after David Cameron launched a crackdown on EU migrants getting benefits, a senior Brussels official has said.

Laszlo Andor, the EU employment commissioner, said the prime minister’s efforts to outlaw so-called benefit tourism were the product of hysteria, and an “unfortunate overreaction”.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he also suggested Cameron was misleading the public about the potential scale of immigration from Bulgaria and Romania when current controls on migration from those countries are lifted on January 1.

“The unilateral rhetoric is not really helpful, because it risks presenting the UK as a nasty country in the European Union. We don’t want that,” he said.

Cameron’s official spokesman said the government would press on regardless of any objections or legal action from the EU.

“This is what we’re going to do,” he said, adding: “We’re not the only country to see free movement as a qualified right.”

Under the prime minister’s proposals, there would be a ban on new arrivals claiming housing benefit and a three-month wait before they could claim jobseeker’s allowance.

The move would require some secondary legislation; higher fines for employers paying less than the minimum wage would require new primary legislation.

The opposition Labour party’s home affairs spokeswoman, Yvette Cooper, was granted an urgent question on the issue in the House of Commons on Wednesday.

In an article for the Financial Times, Cameron said he shared the deep concerns of many people in Britain at the EU’s requirement to lift transitional controls on Romanians and Bulgarians in January, and blamed “monumental” mishandling of the issue by the previous Labour government.

However, Andor warned against undermining the EU’s guiding principle of freedom of movement.

It would be a slippery slope if EU member states started objecting to things they had signed up to in Brussels, he added.

“This is an unfortunate overreaction,” he said. “We have been in dialogue with the British authorities and government officials in recent years, and we always encouraged a fact-based debate about the movement of workers and the implications.

“We’re not speaking about immigration here. We’re talking about the free movement of workers, which applies to every EU member state; for new member states it only applies after a conditional period. These rules have been developed by these member states themselves together, including the UK. And it’s part of the single market, which the UK appreciates so much in the EU.”

Andor also claimed the British public had “not been given all of the truth and the full truth about the subject” by Cameron.

“For example, in the article by the prime minister, there is a link between the EU enlargement and the number of migrants — [but] about two-thirds of the migrants go to the United Kingdom from non-European countries. And also if you look at the current movement, there’s much more people moving from, for example, Italy and Spain as opposed to Romania and Bulgaria.

“There are also existing EU rules and safeguards against the so-called benefit tourism. If we look at jobseeker’s allowance: if someone newly arrived in the UK or in another country, it is the home country which in the first place needs to cover its necessary jobseeker’s allowance and not the receiving country. So they would need a more accurate presentation of the reality not under such pressure [and] not under such hysteria, which sometimes happens in the UK.”

The lifting in January of transitional controls on Bulgarians and Romanians entering the UK has prompted anxiety about the numbers likely to come and opinion polls showing that most Britons want migrants from the two countries barred from working.

By arrangement with the Guardian