The youth mobility scheme is just the start of a Brexit reversal

Spectator

5 days ago

Will Britain continue to be dragged back closer and closer to the EU so that when we eventually rejoin, in say a decade's time, our politicians can present it as a mere exercise in regularising an arrangement which effectively already exists? At some point it must have dawned on most frustrated remainers that they were never going to reverse Brexit in one fell swoop. That would reopen old wounds, motivate a strong reaction from Brexiteers and a sense of ennui. Such an attempted move would probably be doomed by the 'Brenda from Bristol' effect alone (the elderly lady who reacted to the declaration of the 2017 election campaign by exclaiming to a reporter, 'What, another one?'). But what if Britain were to be drawn back into the bloc by degrees?
It is easy to argue in favour of joining an EU youth mobility scheme for 18 to 30-year-olds. Use those words and people tend to think about university students and graduates gaining experience of living in other countries. As supporters are eager to point out, we already have such arrangements with 13 countries, from Japan to Australia to Uruguay, and no one goes around saying that we have 'free movement' with those countries.
Then again, an EU scheme could end up with a very different balance. No one worries too much about our youth mobility scheme with Australia, for example, because more UK citizens take advantage of it than Australians – the latter of whom only filled 9,000 of the 45,000 places which were available last year (there is an argument for saying that the greater worry is why so few Australians want to come to Britain? Is it a symptom of national decline?).
A European scheme, on the other hand, may have a very different effect. The demographic which would benefit – 18-30 year olds – rather matches the large numbers of Eastern Europeans who took advantage of free movement during Britain's membership of the EU. It would end up as just another source of cheap labour for employers, which ends up suppressing wages and opportunities for UK workers at the bottom end of the jobs market.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper does sound alive to the risks of entering into a youth mobility scheme. She is reported to be pressing for EU citizens using such a scheme to be limited to twelve months in Britain; any longer and they will appear in official migration figures.
But it isn't just on free movement that Britain risks being drawn back into the EU's sphere of influence. Keir Starmer's reset in EU relations has already, quietly, led to Britain agreeing to mirror EU rules and regulations on food and agriculture. It could mean, unless Starmer succeeds in persuading the EU to allow Britain an exemption, the end of our newfound freedom to embrace gene-edited crops. EU regulations previously destroyed what had been a promising UK industry in genetically modified (GM) foods a quarter of a century ago by making it all but impossible to conduct field trials. We are heading towards the 'vassal state' which many Brexiteers feared.
I don't think we have seen the end of this process. We should expect more initiatives to draw us back towards EU rules and regulations. An 'ever closer union' might be one way of describing it. So long as every step is small, the government's diehard remainers might just get away with it.