Tower and Town, September 2016

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The EU Referendum and Migration

It’s clear that immigration played a part in the decision of some people to vote Leave in the June referendum. However, although there are certainly a few people with generalised anti-immigrant sentiments – and that not just in Britain but across the EU – I believe there are much more significant currents flowing. It has to do with the Free Movement Of People. Here is my take on it.

We watched a number of interviews with people at the bottom of our economic heap here in the UK, and for them it's quite simple.  While for us comfortably-off folk the free movement of people has meant nice cheap EU labour and a rising standard of living, for those being interviewed it has meant an uncontrollable stream from the poorer, newly-joined countries competing for work and adding pressure on housing and other services. They feel it has contributed directly to increased inequality.  We don’t see that.  We live above that. 

The free movement of people was a fine idea when the members of the EU were of more or less equal standard of living and the flow of migration equal in all directions. However, when the EU started admitting countries with a lower standard of living, the flow of people from poorer countries became more powerful than that going the other way. In January 1973 I was already in Paris ready to take up a job. When Romania (for example) joined the EU, my children had no plans to head for Bucharest. The dynamic is now entirely different.

For the EU the free movement of people is a central article of faith; for the people we heard in the interviews it has become a direct threat, but one that Merkel is reported to have refused point blank to negotiate. Sooner or later, somewhere across the rich northern nations of the EU, reaction was bound to burst through.  Probably because our language is the international lingua franca and our job market so open, it's happened here first, but it's not just Britain where these opposing currents are stirring turbulence – and there is no apparent limit to the queue of poorer countries lining up to join.

Hugh de Saram