It turns out that
Starmer’s much-vaunted ‘reset’ with the EU amounts to little more than changing
the colour of the icing on the imaginary cake. Just like his predecessors, he
believes that the UK is so important to everyone that it can have the advantages
of membership of the EU without having to abide by the same rules, or make any
concessions in return. Little Englander cakeism is alive and well in the
English Labour Party; it’s just a little more polite and diplomatic in its
language.
One of the issues
surrounds the idea of some sort of youth mobility scheme, under which young
people from the UK and young people from the EU would be given the right, for a
limited period of time, to travel to each other’s countries and experience a
little of life there. Getting to know and understand each other better is one
of the aims of the whole European project, which began in the aftermath of a
war in which a lack of common understanding led to millions of deaths. Youth
mobility is one of those things which, taken in isolation, many would consider
entirely unobjectionable. Not so the Home Secretary, who sees it as allowing ‘migration’
and is strongly
opposing it in cabinet, even if the consequence is a lack of movement on
the PM’s stated objective of smoothing trade between the EU and the UK. Given
that it’s a mutual scheme – traffic is supposed to be two ways – what is the
objection to such a reasonable proposal?
The Home Secretary clearly believes that there would be a large difference
between the numbers coming here from the EU and the numbers travelling from the
UK to the EU, which would show in the statistics as an increase in net
migration. There are two reasons why she might be right.
The first is
language. Whilst proficiency in two or more languages is common in most of
Europe, with English being the second language of choice in most cases, modern
foreign language teaching has largely been gutted in the UK. Other Europeans
find it easier to adapt to the UK than young people from the UK do in the rest
of Europe. That makes the UK a destination of choice for young Europeans (and,
of course, part of the reason that the EU is pushing the idea so hard).
The second is to do
with class and affluence. In the UK, the desire to allow young people to
broaden their experiences and learn about other peoples and cultures is largely
a middle-class obsession. Look at who supports it – the liberal and middle
class elites. It just doesn’t have the same resonance and attraction for young
working class people in the so-called ‘red wall’ or post-industrial areas. It’s
not something that they see as relevant to them. The political opposition comes
overwhelmingly from the Little Englanders who very much want those young people not
to mingle with foreigners in case they do find a commonality of interest and
understanding. And it’s that political opposition which is the real obstacle.
The fact that the
Home Secretary might be right about the imbalance in numbers is not, however, a
reason for simply dismissing the idea completely. The language problem could be
overcome, in time, by investing more in the teaching of European languages, and
the problem of relevance only to middle-class children could be overcome by a
system of grants, scholarships, and encouragement for those not following a
more academic path in life. But both of those things require political will and
a consistent policy over many years; and that is the problem. If your political strategy depends on
stoking hatred and fear of difference, to say nothing of an inherent belief in
your own group’s natural superiority, the last thing you want is to encourage
any mingling with ‘them’.
Sadly, such Little Englandism
isn’t confined to the ranks of Reform and the Tories; it seems to have found a
very comfortable home in the Labour Party as well. Worse, within the UK it isn’t
even wholly confined to England either. In Wales, however, we do have a route
to escape it if we choose. It wouldn’t take long for an independent Wales to
understand that our longer term interests have more in common with those of a
number of other small nations and regions on the mainland than with our large
neighbour, stuck as it is in a distorted dream of past glory.
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