I know that a lot of people voted to leave the EU because they don’t like foreigners. Or more specifically, they don’t like foreigners coming to work here, taking our jobs/doing the crap jobs we don’t want to do. Take your pick on that one, although I would say that the former is bollocks. Anyway, thanks to the genius of Theresa May’s ‘deal’ with the EU, those pesky foreigners will not find it so easy to come here. We can dramatically slow migration, just like we always could, but chose not to, whilst we were members of the EU. Confused? Mrs May certainly hopes you are.
The key words of May’s ‘deal’ are that it will “End Freedom of Movement once and for all.” You can’t get clearer than that. And up and down the land, I can hear the voices echo in celebration. Britain First, comes the cry. Christ: that would make a great name for a far right political party, wouldn’t it?
Stopping foreigners coming to work in Britain surely has no downside, does it? The dole queues are full of people who could do the jobs in the NHS, the social care sector, the cleaning jobs, the jobs in hospitality that these people with different accents to us carry out at the moment. Old people could be forced back to work if we raised the retirement age again, the severely disabled could be encouraged to grow new limbs or learn to see again and the mentally ill can simply be told to “snap out of it”. It’s so easy.
Let’s face it: everyone supports the end of free movement, the Tory government and, perhaps surprisingly, the hard left Labour opposition included. It matters not that Labour might be supporting the end of free movement as a tactic, as a means of convincing areas of the country which voted leave that the party understands what they are saying. I take Labour at face value. Like May, they want to pull up the drawbridge to mainland Europe. That drawbridge will have, for some, unintended consequences.
The end of free movement means the end of freedom of movement not just for Johnny Foreigner, but also for us. We are saying that not only do we want to stop foreign people coming here, we want to stop ‘our’ people going there. No longer will foreigners be able to come here to live, love, study, travel freely across borders, work and retire in this country, so our own people will lose the same rights. How many times have you heard people yearn for their retirement, when they can sell up and move permanently to the sun? Many of the people who voted leave but wish to retire to Spain or Greece will no longer be able to do so. That is not a scare story: that is a fact. We told you that by voting to leave the EU, it would deny the rights and freedoms you enjoyed to your children. Look what you’ve done.
Now, I have heard people say that losing freedom of movement is a price worth paying, even if it is their own children who will pay that price. It is worth the inevitable damage to our living standards and our standing in the world, they will say. Not arguments I have a great deal of sympathy with, I have to say, but I’ll let those who want to take away from their children what they enjoyed explain why they did it.
Even the two people who led the negotiations, David Davis and Dominic Raab, condemn their own efforts by saying May’s ‘deal’ would be worse than remaining in the EU. The truth is that any deal will be worse than leaving the EU and no deal will be the worst option of all. In which case, why are we leaving at all?
For those of you hoping that next March, when we leave Europe, will see the end of this endless national argument, dream on, because this is just the start. This crummy deal is just the basis for leaving the EU. The post EU scenario will occupy every aspect of political life for years, probably decades, to come. And all to make ourselves worse off on the basis of a false prospectus sold to us by shysters, liars and English nationalists.
May says people just want to see the government “get on with it”, which is yet another lie peddled by an incompetent, weak and out-of-her-depth prime minister. As for May’s ‘deal’, it reminds me that you can put make-up on a pig, but it’s still a pig. And May’s deal is an absolute pig’s ear of a deal for Britain.
