Thank you very much.

So thank you to Cells for giving me the opportunity to spend time here as a visitor.

I'm on research leave at the minute and it has been brilliant.

I'm never going to go back to teaching again, I think, and for being able to present my work today.

This paper is part of a bigger project, a bigger book project, which I'm working on here,

which looks at the effects of EU enlargement in 2004 and 2007 on the labour law systems

in five EU member states, and Germany and the UK, which is what I want to talk

about today, are two of those states.

In the course of writing the book, I've noticed that there is comparatively little written

on the 2007 enlargement specifically, especially in comparison to the 2004 enlargement.

So the focus of this paper is very much on the 2007 enlargement.

So what I want to talk about today is the EU enlargements in 2004 and 2007, which are unprecedented

in scale in the EU's history. They've led, as I'm sure we all know,

to an increase of inner EU migration of workers, especially of new member state workers,

to old member states. Prior to the enlargements, member states were given the option of

restricting workers' rights to freedom of movement, one of the fundamental pillars of EU law.

And on the 1st of January this year, the last of these restrictions were lifted for Bulgarian and Romanian citizens whose countries joined the EU in 2007.

Despite economic evidence pointing to new member state workers having a largely positive impact

on the economies of their host states, public opinion, as I'm sure we are all very much aware,

an old member state is increasingly hostile, not only to migration from Romania and Bulgaria,

but to EU integration itself.

And being in the UK, I'm sure not a day goes by where we don't hear something about this.

...