Don’t compromise on border controls
IF THERE is a single issue likely to prove a deal-breaker to a smooth UK departure from the EU it is likely to be freedom of movement. This is code for the absolute right of anyone born or naturalised into any of the other 27 members to up sticks and emigrate without let or hindrance into any other member country and stay for ever. For Brussels and all other member countries it is crucial but for one country, ours, it is a huge and growing burden.
How did this come about? Were there no warning signs? Actually there were two but no one took any notice. In 1991 we witnessed something utterly unforeseen since the founding of the EU (or its predecessor the Common Market). This was the implosion of the Soviet Union. Within a few months this Soviet empire, our opponent for 46 years of Cold War, had ceased to exist. Mikhail Gorbachev had dissolved the USSR. The Iron Curtain was no more.
More to the point, the 10 colonystatus countries of Eastern Europe were free of Moscow’s thraldom. Not unnaturally their people looked out from their impoverished, shambolic communist economies and lusted for something better. And there, just across the river or even across the road, was that something: Western Europe. Rich, booming, free, an economic magnet. But for the Eastern Europeans there was first a major problem.
THE EU imposed a ban on the impoverished ex-members of the old Comecon from joining. There were reforms to accomplish: switching from communism to capitalism, from dictatorship to democracy, law code reforms, civil rights, treaties to be negotiated. For 10 more years the drawbridge remained up. Then finally those 10 governments were allowed to join and more than a hundred million Eastern Europeans were allowed to emigrate westwards. So they began to do just that.
All this while a quietly hidden second problem had been in the process of solution. Language. Prior to the disappearance of the Iron Curtain there had been no right-tosettle problem. The EU members were first six, then nine (when we joined in 1973), then 12, then 15. But these 15 were all of pretty equal levels of prosperity so the migration levels were more or less in balance. The 10 new countries, still vastly poorer, formed a human tidal wave.
Under the Soviets all those young people learned in school their own native language and, for a second language, Russian. Suddenly given a different school choice they all chose English and our language has become a true world lingo. You are a Balt, Hungarian, Slovak with ambitions to be worldwide employable? Learn English. So they did.
The outcome of this was perfectly foreseeable and it has come to pass. This country is the super-magnet of the entire continent. We have no defence but number-capping, which is forbidden. It is easy for the regimes of Finland, Portugal, Greece to insist nothing has changed. No Eastern European is interested in learning Finnish, Portuguese or Greek into order to settle there.
But sooner or later we are going to have to say, “We are bursting at the seams, we cannot take limitless numbers, plus the second tidal wave from Africa and Asia. It is nothing to do with race, colour or creed. It is about survival.” That is why we have to leave our present thraldom to the EU and its rules as fast as we can.