Rachel Reeves sounds surprisingly perky. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has, of course, been forced – we may think, through gritted teeth – to say nice things she cannot possibly have believed about the Trumpian tariff programme that threatens to take a guillotine to her beloved fiscal headroom without her being able to do a damn thing about it. But, interviewed by the Times, she professed herself encouraged by better-than-expected statistics on consumer spending. And she also showed signs of doing something rather interesting, i.e. rolling the pitch for a bit of a climbdown on youth mobility.
‘No plans for a youth mobility scheme’ had been the line before the election. Now she says: ‘We do want to see better trading relationships between our countries and we do want to enable young people from Europe and the UK to be able to work and travel overseas.’ She’s still having, it seems obvious, Herbert-Lom-in-Pink-Panther-style panic attacks at the thought of the Reform vote, so she caveats the thought immediately by saying, ‘we’ve got to get the balance right, because I do not want to see net migration increasing. I want to see net migration falling’. But the drift of her thought is evidently towards, rather than away from, greater freedom of movement.
For true believers of a sustainable Brexit, this can only, surely, be a good thing
Good. Perhaps entirely predictably, my own first and strongest instinct is to argue that depriving our children of the right to work and study, or even to buy property and settle down, wherever they like in the whole continent of Europe, was a gigantically small-minded and stupid thing to do. And, likewise, my instinct is to say that the same applies in reverse, and that we are nothing but advantaged by European twentysomethings offering their talents and enthusiasm and suntanned good looks to our decrepit old homeland. I think that an older generation sentimentally infatuated by an abstract idea of ‘sovereignty’ sacrificed the prospects and opportunities of their children and grandchildren on the altar of a programme that couldn’t quite decide if it was statist or laissez-faire, whether it loved more the free movement of capital or hated more the free movement of labour.
Still suffering, as I do, from Brexit Derangement Syndrome, indeed, I’d like to reverse the whole shebang, Schengen everyone back up and sing the Marseillaise or the Ode To Joy under a giant blue-and-yellow firework display while a flock of drones laser-etch the lovely beaming face of Ursula von der Leyen onto the Putin façade of the Palace of Westminster. But that’s just me, and I know that many readers of this magazine will tend to disagree more or less strongly.
And of course, I very much recognise the ironclad democratic mandate of the 52 per cent of us who voted to Take Back Control. I acknowledge, shamefacedly, that it was a fool’s errand to hope for a second referendum. But I also observe that the so-called ‘second referendum’ we argued about so fiercely would have been, in point of fact, a third referendum, and that we all seem to have agreed that after a whole generation had passed since the first referendum in 1975, it was proper to have another one in 2016. Which is to say: we’re due another in a couple of decades if we’re not careful.
So the argument I make, instead, is this: that Rachel Reeves and her successors should encourage youth mobility not to reverse Brexit, but to save it. If Brexit was more than a spasm of dissatisfaction, if it was more than a crotchety burst of anti-globalist nostalgia – if it was, in other words, a coherent vision of a permanent British sovereign independence – then that vision will need a new generation to support it once its original enthusiasts have gone with their blue passports to the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.
Because at present, polling continues to tell us, the under-thirties are the cohort far and away the least enthusiastic about the whole project. They are more mobile, more unsettled, more hungry for experience and opportunity – in other words, the ones most likely to feel that they have been royally screwed by a settlement that makes it much harder for them to roam freely, and work and study, all over the continent.
So Rachel Reeves is surely right to think of throwing them a bone. Will they not think more warmly of Britain’s new place in the world if it doesn’t preclude them from a year or two being digital nomads in the trattorias of Southern Italy, doesn’t stand for the shuttering of our membership of the Erasmus programme, doesn’t give them the chance to bum around doing odd jobs to sustain their explorations of rural Poland, or what have you?
I think they will. And for true believers of a sustainable Brexit, that can only, surely, be a good thing. If Reeves continues to drift in this direction, then she’s not undermining Brexit by stealth. She is, rather, feeling her way as delicately as she can towards future-proofing it.
Comments