‘Free movement’ will have to end if the EU is to survive migrant crisis

The basic refusal to accept that member states have different needs is likely to destabilise the union

France and points North on the other neatly misses the point. It is precisely the freedom of movement guaranteed to legitimate EU citizens that is exacerbating (or helping to create) the mass migration problem, by portraying Europe as an unpoliced, open-access, free-for-all.

The movement of peoples from poor or war-ravaged countries to rich, stable ones is nothing new. Nor are civil war, tyranny and poverty in Africa and the Middle East anything new (although much of the developing world is now emerging from poverty as a consequence of free trade). The determination to escape from such conditions has been a fact of global life for generations.

What has given a fresh impetus to the possibility of such movement – and particularly to economic migration

– is the miraculous invitation offered by a borderless Europe. The message went out to the world: set foot on any Greek island, or on the southernmost rocky prominence of Italy, and you will become effectively invisible, able to make your way unhindered to any of the flourishing nations of Western Europe because, even though you are not legally entitled to the “free movement” rights that belong to EU citizens, there will be no checks at national crossing points to impede you.

So every coastline entry point and every land border became a target for the criminally ruthless peopletrafficking industry that could offer heaven on earth to the desperate – or at least to those who had enough money to pay what it demanded (which is to say, not the poorest or most desperate).

So this is the other side of that sacrosanct principle which has become an intractable sticking point in the Brexit negotiations as well as the most incendiary issue within the EU itself. Now it seems that Philip Hammond has won the fight within Cabinet to maintain the free movement of people for an as yet unspecified transition period (two years? four years? for ever?) because business interests have expressed so much concern about losing the infinite supply of workers that the less fortunate member countries provide.

And here is the essence of it: many business sectors in Britain, from agriculture to catering, have become dependent on a permanent flow of foreign staff. There is an economic justification, at least in the short term, for letting this continue, even though it will specifically flout the stated desires of the population and thus risk dangerous political backlash.

Similarly, Germany, where an ageing population is in need of an injection of young workers, benefits massively not only from the importation of eastern and southern Europeans but potentially from the Syrian refugees that it so controversially welcomed.

It is hardly surprising that Germany – and the Brussels establishment over which it has such influence – is one of the most implacable advocates of free movement. But ask yourself: what effect is that diaspora of young people fleeing from the poorer countries of the EU and the rest of the world, offering their labour and energies to richer countries, likely to have in the end? Those poorer, former communist EU states that have had such a bad press for their hostility to migrants can see very clearly where this might be heading: to permanent backwardness and dependence on bail-outs – ironically from Germany, whose own population so resents this arrangement.

It is significant that this troublesome

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion principle is now always described by the Brussels apparat as the “free movement of people”, which seems to imbue it with an almost Biblical righteousness. But the actual wording of the EU rule refers to the “free movement of workers”. Free movement is applied to four categories as if they were morally equivalent: goods, capital, services and labour. Goods are things, capital is money, and services are transactions: to treat workers as if they were not qualitatively different from the others is an almost perfect example of what Marx called the “commodification of labour”. Turning people into one more financial resource for business may suit the corporate interests of Europe (and the UK) very well, but it hardly seems to match the idealistic aspirations of the European project. Is this what is meant by a Brexit that “puts jobs first”?

The mutual suspicion and political destabilisation of Europe that is being precipitated by the migrant crisis will have to be faced, whatever terms the UK accepts. Italy’s populist Five Star Movement is making hay over the French hard line on its border. Even Italian politicians of more conventional persuasions are furious that their country – which has 40 per cent youth unemployment – is being left to cope with the migrant flow that is being shut out by France, just as Greece was left to cope when it was the arrival point of choice last summer.

The failure of the EU to deal with migration is not just incompetence: it comes from a basic refusal to accept that its member states have different and conflicting needs. To save the rest of the project, “free movement” will have to be shut down: the only question is how organised or chaotic that process is going to be.

Italian politicians are furious that they are being left to cope with the migrant flow shut out by France