Prime minister arrives in Latvia determined to press Britain’s case for change, but warns there will be ‘lots of ups and downs along the way’

David Cameron has warned there will be ups and downs in his battle for changes to the European Union, as he arrived at a summit in Latvia.

Speaking from Riga before his first summit with EU leaders since his general election victory, the UK prime minister played down any expectations of a quick deal and suggested other countries and commentators would initially create “noise” to undermine his aims.

However, he emphasised his determination to get a new deal for Britain and explain to leaders that the UK referendum on EU membership would definitely take place before the end of 2017. There have been reports that Cameron was hoping to get a deal done a year early and then hold a referendum in 2016, but this is his first face-to-face opportunity to test the appetite for change among a wide variety of EU leaders since he won the election outright.

As he entered the talks, Cameron said: “It is an opportunity to start some of the discussions about the reform of the European Union. There will be ups and downs – you’ll hear one day this is possible, the next day something else is impossible.

“But one thing throughout all of this will be constant and that is my determination to deliver for the British people a reform of the European Union so they get a proper choice in that referendum we hold: an in/out referendum before the end of 2017.

“That will be constant. But there’ll be lots of noise, lots of ups and downs along the way.”

The main focus of the Eastern Partnership summit is talks between EU leaders and former Soviet countries including Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. The turmoil in Ukraine and relations with Russia are likely to be at the top of the agenda.



However, Cameron will also be seeking to lobby for EU reform on the fringes of the conference, mainly with leaders of smaller countries with whom he might not have spent much time.

It is understood he intends his conversations with leaders to be fairly general, setting out his view of the mood towards the EU in the UK and some of the areas he wants to see change. More detailed demands will be discussed at a later date, including the EU summit in June and major talks with his French and German counterparts after his government has set out its legislative plans in the Queen’s speech.



While Cameron had a “brush-by” meeting with the Polish prime minister and talks with leaders from Hungary and Sweden on Friday morning, other leaders expressed an element of frustration that Cameron was trying to push his own agenda at the summit.

Martin Schulz, the European parliament president and German social democrat MEP, said: “I don’t expect a difficult debate with David Cameron today. Debates with David Cameron are always difficult, here or elsewhere.”

Cameron has already made clear that one of the “absolute requirements” is change to allow member states to set their own limits on how long migrants should have to wait before being able to claim welfare benefits. The UK wants to impose a four-year wait.

Despite requests from other countries for Cameron to be clearer about his demands, a Whitehall source said it was not yet decided whether the prime minister would show his hand by setting out all his requests at any point.

Cameron is mainly seeking changes that would reduce immigration to Britain from other EU countries. On Thursday, the latest UK figures showed net migration rose to 318,000 last year.

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Other leaders, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, have indicated that the fundamental principle of free movement is non-negotiable. However, the UK is hoping there will be a way of making the changes to benefits while preserving this central tenet of the EU.

Other British demands include an exclusion from the EU’s commitment to ever closer union and the ability of national parliaments to work together to block legislation. Cameron has sounded increasingly emboldened about achieving change in the European Union since his re-election.

A document leaked to the Times revealed that UK officials were suggesting that the EU should stop defining itself as a single-currency area, given that countries such as Britain and Denmark have kept their own. A Whitehall source said this was not the main thing on the UK’s wishlist, but that the government was on the lookout for anything that could be interpreted as discrimination against non-eurozone countries.

British officials said that Cameron would travel to Berlin and Paris next week for talks with Merkel and the French president, François Hollande.

“The focus more of these discussions today is to set out the reason why he is doing this, the views of the British people about the EU, the fact that they are not happy with the status quo and what they need to change,” one official said. “It will be broader brush than really specifics of working through things.”

On Thursday, Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, invited the UK chancellor, George Osborne, for talks to discuss the UK’s desire for treaty changes along with his country’s wish for more integrated fiscal policy in the eurozone. “We have talked about him coming to Berlin so that we can think together about how we can combine the British position with the urgent need for a strengthened governance of the eurozone,” the German minister said.

Prof Günter Verheugen, a German politician and former EU commissioner, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday morning that the free movement of people principle would “absolutely not” be negotiated, but that the benefits migrants are entitled to once they arrive in a country would be.

“When the whole debate started there was clearly a strong opinion that the UK would be an affordable loss and that the troublemaker may go if the troublemaker wants to do so. That has changed,” he said. “I think that people are now much more aware that the United Kingdom is crucial not only for the economic future of Europe, but in particular for the political future of Europe.”