Keir Starmer’s recent call for closer alignment with the EU was welcome. Naturally, he felt he had to add the qualification ‘if it’s in our national interest.’ He couldn’t bring himself to say that such an alignment might be ‘in the interests of the UK and Europe as a whole.’ Like John Major declaring ‘Game, Set and Match’ after securing an opt-out from the Maastricht Treaty, it still suggested an ‘us and them’ approach. But at least it was an acknowledgement that closer ties with Europe could be good for Britain, something that might seem obvious after a decade of post-Brexit economic decline.
The government’s recent decision to re-enter the Erasmus+ programme, discussed in LibDem Voice, was also welcome. But there’s still an ‘us and them’ approach even to the question of youth exchanges. It’s not difficult to detect an undertow of concern along the lines of: Won’t it lead to a flood of young good-for-nothings crossing the Channel and adding to our ‘immigration problem’?
If that seems unfair, consider this article from Politico published last October and discussing last May’s EU ‘reset’ summit and the question of joining the Youth Mobility Scheme. As Politico reported, the Chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, Professor Brian Bell, a professor of economics at King’s College London, declared that it was ‘utterly implausible’ that the government would sign up to a new youth mobility programme. He insisted that ‘many more Europeans would likely come to the U.K. under an uncapped scheme than Brits who would go abroad.’
In the manner of economics professors, he then went for statistics. ‘There are six or seven times as many Europeans as there are Brits. So if the probability of wanting to move is the same for Brits as it is for Europeans, you’d have seven times as many Europeans coming here as leaving in that world. Suppose 50,000 Brits wanted to go every year. The equivalent will be 350,000 Europeans arriving.’
There we are. According to the Chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, which certainly has considerable influence on ministers, net migration ‘could be 300,000 up in the first three years of the scheme, when you’re getting the new cohorts arriving, and you’d have a 900,000 additional people in the UK, once you got steady state, and that would be a big effect on net migration.’ ‘New cohorts’ – it sounds like Caesar’s armies crossing the channel two millennia ago. Suddenly the chance to share experiences with different parts of Europe has become a threatened invasion.
These figures, as the article makes clear, are highly questionable. For one thing, there are currently more European citizens leaving the U.K. than arriving — 95,000 a year in net emigration, according to the government’s own statistics. Doubtless part of the reason is that they’re fed up with being seen as invading cohorts. For another, such movements are never simply a matter of the size of the populations on each side of the Channel. Between 2014 and 2020, Erasmus took around 113,000 British students, while the U.K. hosted 190,000 EU students through the programme. That’s a ratio of less than 2 to 1, not 7 to 1. In any case, a Youth Mobility Scheme could be drawn up which will agree a cap on numbers.
The best model for the UK’s future relations with the EU is Switzerland. Yes, Switzerland’s relations with the EU have been subject to complicated set of agreements (about 120 of them). Yes, there have been plenty of controversies (and the Swiss love a referendum). But the overall result works. Switzerland participates in various EU programmes – not only Erasmus+ but also Horizon, (which the UK is part of), and the Galileo satellite navigation system, (which the UK isn’t part of, despite the urgent need to coordinate defence and security arrangements at the European level).
Yes, it’s an arrangement which crosses some so-called red lines, but the Swiss can live with that. Swizerland, for instance, pays into the EU for its partial single market access. It also agrees to freedom of movement with a built-in brake available if economic or social circumstances require it. So far, the brake has not been needed. And fortunately, there’s no economics professor trying to point out that since Switzerland’s population is only about one-fiftieth of that of the EU, there will be fifty times as many people moving in than going out. The actual figure is about three to one, besides which about one third of a million people commute across the Swiss border with EU countries daily for employment.
Whether it’s part of the working day or a longer stay, going to other countries is a natural part of life and an essential ingredient in Switzerland’s wealth. However much we may try to say: ‘We’re different, we’re an island’, (forgetting that the UK includes all those people who daily commute across our own land border with the EU for work in Ireland), being a part of Europe is a natural part of our life too.
Some weeks ago, there was the successful First Reading of Lib Dem MP Dr Al Pinkerton’s Bill on negotiating a customs union with the EU, passed by a majority of 1 vote and with 13 Labour backbenchers supporting the Lib Dems. Whatever happens to Al Pinkerton’s bill, Lib Dems need to keep gnawing away at Labour’s hierarchy in order to push it further towards the ‘closer realignment’ that its leader advocates but is reluctant to commit himself to. Starmer has to be steered away from a self-defeating attempt to defeat Reform by nudging up to their prejudices. Steering him into the EU’s youth mobility scheme and Galileo would be a start.
* Mark Corner is a UK national, who teaches economic history and philosophy at the University of Leuven, is married to a Czech EU official and lives in Brussels. He has just published A Tale of Two Unions suggesting that Brexit may damage the British Union unless the UK becomes more positive about the way the European Union is structured.
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14 Comments
The whole issue of temporary migration of students and people on fixed term visas has been mishandled for years. During the whole era of the May Home Office there was no official mention that 97% of students on visas left after graduation. It was assumed after 2 years that these individuals had immigrated. At 97% you might as well assume that all emigrated, approximate to a rounding error.
If you go looking for an immigration crisis, of course, you can probably find one. In practice work experience visa holders are likely to be just the ones you want to admit on a “points based” scheme. Fill in a form, pay a fee, adjust the stats. Done.
Sadly the politics does not align with economic sense. Someone needs a crisis for the media narrative.
“Nudging up closer to the EU”
How do we know the EU will want us to do this? There’s no point if our overtures are going to be rebuffed. My guess is they’ll be looking ahead at the likely composition of the next government and be thinking that it won’t be a good idea.
In other aspects of life, “getting back together”, or trying to, doesn’t ever quite work out in my experience.
“……….after a decade of post-Brexit economic decline.”
We’ve only been out of the EU for six years. A decade is ten years.
In this period we’ve had Covid, the effects of the Ukraine war and recently the Trump tariffs. So it’s difficult to separate out the effect of Brexit from other factors. Nevertheless there’s no real evidence that Brexit has caused us to do worse than our former trading partners.
The OP contained a more thorough discussion of the stats concerning migration numbers but nothing at all about or supposed “decade of decline”. Whenever figures are presented they are usually based of what a group of pro EU economists think we would have done had we stayed in.
Instead, why not do some comparisons on the real GDP increases in similar economies like France and Germany?
On the statistics, can we not say the same for all countries in the EU, i.e. that more come in than go out? Surely the way to monitor is to look at each country. For example, do the number of Brits going to France match the number of French younsters coming to Britain? Is that not the fair way to look at it?
It is also never mentioned that we already have similar exchange agreements with 13 non-European countries.
Another factor is the decline in our youngsters learning foreign languages, when so many in other European countries learn English. Far more in Europe learn two or more languages. According to House of Commons Library report in 2024, during 2018, 80% of 15-30year olds in European countries were confident in 2 or more languages, whereas in the UK it was only 32%. There has been even further decline in learning foreign languages in the UK since then.
“On the statistics, can we not say the same for all countries in the EU, i.e. that more come in than go out?” <
No. You can say that for everyone ‘coming in’ to one country means that there must be another ‘going out’ from another. It means that there could be a permanent population flow or just a temporary one as those migrants return home.
English has become an international language. It’s the language of the internet. Switch on a music radio station anywhere in the world and the likelihood is that the songs played will be in English. The signs and announcements at the airport and major rail stations will be in English as well as a local language. It’s difficult for any young person in most countries not to learn some English.
As English has become a ‘lingua franca’ there is less need for English speakers to learn another language. There will always be more people wanting to come to the UK to learn and improve their English than English people wanting to go to other countries to learn their languages.
It’s just as natural that there will be a far higher number of young people in Europe who will be at least bilingual as it is for there to be a far higher number of young Welsh people to be bilingual too.
It’s not necessarily a failure of the English education system. It’s something we’d expect to see in all English speaking countries.
The EU’s principal aim is to create a superstate and to remove the Sovereign states role. To this aim it includes a single currency, defence force in time and centralised and undemocratic decision making. The EU will demand massive concessions if we are to be in a customs union including large fees but more concerningly, free movement of people. Whatever we think, the UK voted to govern themselves and control its own borders. We need to realise that grovelling to the EU and accepting their rules will come at a heavy price but more importantly Starmer has no mandate to do this.
@ David, “The EU’s principal aim is to create a superstate and to remove the Sovereign states role”.
At the risk of encouraging you, could you please cite a respectable source for your imaginative suggestion ?
@David
EU spending is restricted by law to 1% of GDP, compare that to The USA where Federal spending usually hovers between 20% & 25%. The EU can never be more than a loose Confederation of States. “Ever closer Union” is just a slogan, it might as well be “Lets all be nice to each other.”
Thanks for your comment David R. The views about building a superstate have been expressed over the years and most recently in November 2023 by a highly respected figure Guy Verhofstadt who expressly stated that wish. The European parliament voted 291 to 273 that week for his proposal. My contention is that this vision will eventually become reality and senior figures within the EU have this on their radar.
@David
The EU has less staff than Birmingham city council and zero military. How do you imagine they are going to impose their will on the governments of 27 countries? The EU superstate idea is nonsense cooked up by the right wing press to scare people into voting for a Brexit that has left us poorer, our borders less secure and, ironically, forced by practical necessity to follow EU rules that we no longer have any role in shaping.
According to https://european-union.europa.eu/live-work-study/jobs-and-traineeships-eu-institutions_en?prefLang=uk, EU institutions employ over 60,000 people.
Precise figures for Birmingham City Council are harder to find but their recent Pay Gap Report(https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/20634/gender_pay_gap_report_2022.pdf) claims, over 10,000, and most other figures online are not too dissimilar from that.
It seems a bit of a stretch to claim that 60,000 is less than 10,000 😉
I stand corrected on my figures. What I should have said is that prior to its 2023 bankruptcy, Birmingham City Council employed approximately 33,000 staff—more than the 32,000 employed by the European Commission.
However, this correction doesn’t undermine the broader point: there remains no credible pathway to an EU superstate. The notion functions more as what Mencken called an ‘imaginary hobgoblin’—a phantom threat used to alarm the populace—than as a realistic prospect grounded in EU institutional development or member state appetite for such transformation.
@David – Your claims about the EU are just Brexiter nonsense.
They were flatly contradicted in the protocol that Cameron secured from the EU Council prior to the 2016 referendum, so repeating them is pointless.
Indeed, had that been the aim of the EU countries, they have had a decade since the Brexit referendum in which they could easily have drafted treaty changes to accomplish them – but have not done so. In fact, they haven’t held a convention to discuss any changes (never mind the ones you suggest), much less gotten round to formalising any changes or ratifying them.
Regarding the numbers being quoted for staff employed by the EU (and Birmingham City Council), it should be mentioned that there has been an increase of almost 140,000 civil servants here since the Brexit referendum (an almost 40% increase).
The increases in numbers were in the departments dealing either with Brexit and its effects or the pandemic and its effects. The latter is, of course, now over but the former isn’t – so it is fairly clear that Brexit has left the taxpayer with a permanently increased bill paying for those additional “Brexit civil servants”.
@ Paul R @ David Raw
“The EU can never be more than a loose Confederation of States.”
““The EU’s principal aim is to create a superstate and to remove the Sovereign states role”.
“…… could you please cite a respectable source for your imaginative suggestion ?”
Whether or not we call a Federal EU a “superstate” ( it probably wont be) there are many in the EU who are federalist in outlook. Guy Verhofstadt published a book entitled “The United States of Europe”.
EU federalists have their own political organisation. See the link below. The introduction of the euro, a common Parliament, Common laws throughout the EU, and a EU president are all clearly meant to pave the way for just such a Federation. You don’t need any of these to have “a loose Confederation of States”.
The EU Federalists are correct in wanting to move away from what exists now. It’s a dysfunctional ‘betwixt and between’ state. Neither a Federal State nor a loose confederation. The best option would be to move back to a loose confederation but I’d say that was politically impossible.
So it has to be a Federation. That’s going to be a tough ask though.
That’s fine by most in the UK, former Remainers and Leavers alike. We should hope they succeed. This is providing we aren’t a part of it.
If they don’t succeed the break up could be messy and we’ll be adversely affected by the fallout.
https://www.thenewfederalist.eu/2026-a-decisive-year-for-european-federalism?lang=fr