EU threat to make us pay for a visa to go to Europe

BRITISH holidaymakers and travellers could be forced to pay for a visa to visit Europe after Brexit if no divorce deal is struck, a leaked document has shown.

Under controversial proposals, European Commission officials have raised the possibility of subjecting British nationals to entry charges should talks break down.

The suggestion will infuriate British officials who have been told that a travel deal will be struck between both sides so that travellers do not require extra paperwork.

It emerged despite the bloc having deals with dozens of countries across the world that allow their citizens to travel to the bloc without visas. Short-stay visas for citizens of countries falling outside the scheme can cost up to £53.

The proposal was contained in a document setting out a number of legal changes that need to be considered by the bloc if a Brexit agreement does not materialise.

The finger of blame over the visa suggestion has been pointed at Martin Selmayr, a close associate of European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.

Mr Selmayr, who is Brussels’ top mandarin and is suspected of pushing a hard-line stance on Brexit, used a strategy document to float the idea, warning that the bloc has to decide whether to force Britons to pay for entry permits.

Alternatively, the EU could decide to list the UK as a ‘visafree’ country, meaning that trips between Britain and Europe would remain similar to the present situation.

A decision to exempt the UK would mean that travellers could visit the bloc for 90 days over a 180-day period without documentation.

Mr Selmayr, who is leading no- deal preparations for the EU, outlined the possibility of the UK being subject to travel visas in a document shown to MEPs. It said: ‘The proposal will amend the regulation to place the UK on either the visa- required list of third countries or the visa-free list.’

Mr Selmayr, the European Commission’s secretary general, who is referred to as ‘the monster’ by Mr Juncker, is known to oppose Brexit and has been accused of damaging leaks against Theresa May.

Formal talks on the issue have yet to start but any decision to hit the UK with visas

‘Hoping for an exemption’

will come in to play if no Brexit agreement is reached by March next year.

Officials believe that imposing visas is highly unlikely given the reliance on travel and tourism between the UK and EU countries. The documentation requirement could also kick-in when a transition deal ends in 2021, if a wider Brexit agreement on trade and other issues falls apart.

Former Brexit minister David Jones told the Politico website: ‘Many third countries enjoy visa-free access to the EU. Given the UK’s historical links, one would not expect the EU to adopt such an apparently perverse position.’

Even if the UK is given an exemption, Britons could still be charged £6 for entry permits under a separate EU plan that will come into force in 2020.

This scheme will apply to visa-free countries, with the electronic visas remaining valid for three years or until the passport used during the registration process expires. The UK is hoping to negotiate an exemption.

Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s Brexit coordinator, said a decision on visa exemption could be linked to a wider future relationship deal. ‘All third country nationals have to face visa requirements unless there’s an exemption,’ he said.

British officials poured cold water on the suggestion that UK travellers could be forced to request visas. They pointed out that such a move would see the UK introduce a visa requirement for travellers from the EU to the UK.

WHAT in God’s name is going on at Britain’s supposedly finest universities, once famed worldwide as centres of academic excellence, enlightenment and independent thought?

I ask because of this week’s furore over an email sent to students at Exeter — one of the 24-strong Russell Group of Britain’s most highly rated seats of learning — containing ‘motivational quotes’ intended to lift their spirits and spur them on.

Among them was what you or I may think the thoroughly sensible observation: ‘One cannot permit unique opportunities to slip by for the sake of trifles.’

This sounds to me like jolly good advice — not just for Exeter students, but for all sorts of people such as die- hard Remainers, who cluck on endlessly about footling obstacles to Brexit, while shutting their eyes to the magnificent opportunities opening up to us.

But it was not the content of this innocuous quote that caused all the fuss. Rather, it was the fact that the words cited were spoken by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who has sometimes been referred to as ‘Hitler’s favourite general’.

Apology

Enough to say that when a student spotted the attribution, all hell broke loose. In the inevitable Twitterstorm that followed, the Exeter authorities issued a grovelling apology, explaining that the staff member who had drafted the email, after searching for inspirational messages on Google, ‘did not recognise the name’.

Said a university spokesman: ‘This was a genuine error and in no way intentional. We apologise unreservedly for any offence caused.’ A staff member added: ‘We will put processes in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again.’

Gott im Himmel! (As the war mags I read in my childhood might have put it.) Yes, Exeter certainly owes an apology — if not for bombarding students with patronising emails, intended to motivate them, then most definitely for employing a staff member who had never heard of Rommel.

But I reckon the university should also apologise profusely to the Field Marshal’s surviving family members for suggesting that this brave and honourable soldier was so far beyond the pale that nothing he ever said should be allowed to reach the eyes or ears of today’s sensitive students.

The ignoramus who drafted the email is clearly not the only member of staff at Exeter who doesn’t know the first thing about Rommel.

So let me offer those apologetic academics a brief history lesson.

For a start, the World War II general popularly known as the Desert Fox (or ‘Der Wustenfuchs’ to his own side) was ‘a great field commander’ and an ‘ extraordinarily bold and clever opponent’. Don’t take my word for it. This was the judgment of Sir Winston Churchill, speaking in the Commons debate after the fall of Tobruk in the North African campaign.

Highly decorated in the 1914-18 War, and the author of a best-selling book on military tactics, Rommel also had a widely attested reputation as a humane officer, who spoke his mind to superiors, showed consideration towards subordinates and on the whole treated prisoners of war decently.

True, in common with enormous numbers of his fellow Germans, he backed Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933. And like so many others, he was at first mesmerised by the dictator, who in turn befriended him and talked him up as a war hero and role model for the country’s youth.

Rommel was never a member of the Nazi Party, however, and many have testified (though this has been disputed) that he was not much interested in politics. As far as I’m aware, though I stand to be corrected, there is no evidence at all that he ever shared Hitler’s virulent anti-Semitism or any of the rest of his repugnant ideology.

But it’s the circumstances of the Desert Fox’s death that set him farthest apart from the great mass of lesser Germans, who were prepared to follow their Fuhrer to the end. For whatever he may have thought of Hitler in the early days, by 1944 Rommel was implicated in the July 20 plot to assassinate him.

Cyanide

When the plot failed and the charges were laid before him, he was given three choices. He could answer personally to Hitler or face trial by the People’s Court — either of which would have meant allbutcertain execution not just for him but for his wife and son and others close to him. Or else he could commit suicide, with the promise that the manner of his death would be hushed up and he would be given a hero’s funeral.

Having secured assurances that his family and staff would be protected if he took his own life, he swallowed the cyanide pill handed to him by Hitler’s messengers. And this is the man whose memory Exeter University finds so offensive that it feels it must apologise for quoting him? They don’t feel like that about him in modern, liberal Germany, where the Desert Fox is one of the very few prominent figures in the Third Reich who is remembered without shame.

To this day, the German army’s largest military base, at Augustdorf, carries the proud name of the Field Marshal Rommel Barracks.

Yes, of course, it is possible to argue that if Rommel had been more successful in his defence of the Normandy coast against the D-Day landings, and Germany had won the war, countless more victims would have suffered from Hitler’s vile regime.

But then the same goes for all the millions who wore German uniform between 1939 and 1945. Is Exeter planning to ban its staff from quoting anything any of them ever said?

Terror

Like so many people of my post-war generation, lucky enough to be British, I’ve often asked myself whether I would have had the guts to stand up against Hitler if I’d had the deep misfortune to have been a German of fighting age in the Thirties and Forties.

I’d love to think that the answer is Yes. In my dreams, I would have offered sanctuary to Jews and plotted against the Nazis — or at the very least, I would have refused to fight.

Yet in my heart of hearts, I know damn well that I would have lacked the moral and physical fibre to do any of these things. Instead, I would have fallen in with the overwhelming majority, putting on the uniform of the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine or the Wehrmacht (please, God, not the Gestapo or the SS!), raising my arm obediently in the Hitler salute and going into battle for the forces of evil against the liberal democracy I love.

No, it takes a very special sort of courage to break from the herd — nowhere more so than in a terrifying dictatorship like the Third Reich, where the penalties for dissent were the concentration camp, torture and death. I know, to my shame, that I lack it. Rommel had it in spades.

Yet here are the staff of one of our leading universities, grovelling in terror and insulting the memory of a brave man by issuing abject apologies for quoting him, when they face nothing more frightening than a Twitterstorm.

But then what better can we expect of an academic world in which they’re tearing down statues and turning pictures to the wall at the slightest hint of students’ disapproval of the subjects depicted?

They’ll be burning books next. And just in case nobody’s told them, that’s what the Nazis did.