What Went Wrong with Brexit by Peter Foster

Author:Peter Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd

7

Wish You Were Here

During his speech setting out a vision for post-Brexit Britain in Greenwich in February 2020 Boris Johnson, as well as lionising the UK’s imminent rebirth as a global trading power, also recalled that the UK’s relations with ‘our closest neighbours’ in the EU extended far beyond trade. The prime minister, who attended the European School in Brussels between the ages of eight and eleven, said he fully understood the need for continued cultural and scientific exchange between Europe and the UK after Brexit. ‘In all these other areas, I see the same need for warmth,’ Johnson said, promising that he would preserve ‘co-operation for friendship and exchange, and va et vient’ – coming and going – ‘for academics, students and businesses, but’, he added ominously, ‘I see no need to bind ourselves to an agreement with the EU.’

As ever, Johnson delivered his lines with brio, but the last part of that sentence was shot through with a breezy cakeism that would end up carelessly destroying much of what he professed to want to protect. A great deal of the va et vient of daily life between the UK and the EU depends on agreements. First and foremost, of course, the free movement of people itself. But there are also schemes like group passports for school trips, or the EU’s other official exchange programmes, like Erasmus+ for students or the Horizon Europe programme for scientific research. Those two schemes alone pool €120 billion to facilitate networks of education and research across the continent. But as the trade deal negotiations came to a close in 2020, Johnson decided at the last minute not to join Erasmus+. And while the UK did negotiate to retain associate membership of Horizon Europe, its participation in the scheme was blocked by the European Commission for the first three years because the Johnson government was failing to implement the deal it had agreed for post-Brexit trading arrangements in Northern Ireland.

But even outside these formal schemes, the ending of free movement and the imposition of border checks and controls has thrown sand into the gears of a wide range of EU–UK human interactions. In the creative industries, for example, TV production crews and touring musicians now need expensive documents to travel with their cameras and instruments alongside multiple flavours of work visa to play gigs in the EU. Schools across Europe that used to come on trips to the UK every year are now no longer able to use ID cards or group passports to bring their children to the UK, so many have stopped. The lack of a Youth Mobility Scheme for 18–30-year-olds (of the kind the UK enjoys with much more distant countries like Australia, Canada, and Japan) also stops thousands of young Brits and Europeans earning their way across each other’s countries, working as au pairs, for example, or as seasonaires doing a summer in a Spanish campsite or a winter in a French ski resort. All of these activities have become substantially more expensive and complex as a result of Brexit.

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