Merkel not giving up on UK

Steffen Seibert, the spokesman for Angela Merkel, said on Monday that the German chancellor wanted Britain to remain an "active and engaged" member of the European Union but added that she would would not give way to the British prime minister's plans to curb immigration from other EU countries.

Ahead of May 2015 elections, David Cameron has reacted to pressure from Britain's isolationist anti-EU UK Independence Party by pledging to take steps to limit the level of migration into Britain.

Seibert said that Germany shared an interest in fighting "possible abuse" of labor and social welfare benefits laws but insisted that the overall EU principle of freedom of movement must remain.

Without identifying sources, the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Sunday that German officials could envision giving up efforts to keep Britain in the European Union if Cameron continued to insist on limits.

According to Der Spiegel, Merkel has warned her British counterpart that such a policy would represent a "point of no return" that could sharply increase the risk of the United Kingdom leaving the EU.

'Our benefits system'

If re-elected, Cameron has pledged renegotiate the UK's EU ties before giving Britons a membership referendum in 2017 amid public disenchantment over immigration via the 28-nation bloc.

Cameron has not yet set out those plans in detail, but he has made it clear that he wants to find a way of respecting the European Union's rules governing unhindered movement to work while clamping down on what he has called "freedom to claim benefits."

Merkel's spokesman cited "strong interest" in cooperating with Britain to tackle any abuse of the freedom of movement, but a senior Cameron administration official said Monday that he doubted the harsh tone of Spiegel's report.

Osborne plays down report

"I think it's a little bit thin," UK Finance Minister George Osborne said, adding that his own contacts within the German government understood the anxiety about EU migrants claiming welfare benefits. "The British public want this addressed," Osborne told the BBC on Monday. "We are going to do this in a calm, rational way."

Osborne said concerns about EU immigration had begun to run so high in the United Kingdom that Cameron's Conservatives needed to explain how they would address them if re-elected.

"It was never envisaged that you would have such large numbers of people coming, who don't have job offers, people who move on to our benefit system," Osborne said. "And that causes a lot of public unhappiness."

In recent weeks, Cameron has also been rebuked by then-European Commission President Jose Manual Barroso for his role in stoking Britain's euroskepticism, and by the EU budget commissioner for attempting to renegotiate the United Kingdom's contribution to the bloc's finances.

mkg/ipj (AP, Reuters)