EU citizens made Britain their home – now they face a hostile environment
Since the pandemic stopped British citizens moving freely across Europe, the sacrifice of that same freedom to Brexit has not been felt much. It isn’t even a cost in Eurosceptic lore, where the right to live and work in 27 other countries was never treated as a reciprocal benefit. It was resented as a licence for them to come over here.Revoking it was priority number one for the UK in talks with Brussels.
The referendum result was interpreted as a duty to satisfy people who saw no value in freedom of movement at the expense of people who had built their lives around it. That included plenty of UK citizens at work or in retirement in mainland Europe. The price of a dark blue passport was someone else’s world turned upside down.
That particular argument is over, but Brexit is only “done” in the sense that Boris Johnson is done thinking about it. Moving on is hardly an option for millions of EU nationals who had the welcome mat pulled from under their feet. The total number is unknown. They were not counted on the way in because they arrived as citizens, not aliens. That is what freedom of movement meant. Rights conferred by EU membership must now be traded for conditional status, achieved by navigation of a bureaucratic labyrinth – the Home Office’s “EU settlement scheme”.
At least 5.4 million people have applied. Not all of them will be valid candidates, but the volume suggests that previous counts, putting the number of EU nationals in the UK at about 3.6 million, fell short. The deadline for applications, when a “grace period” expires, is 30 June 2021. The current backlog of unprocessed cases is about 320,000. No one knows how many more are entitled to stay but have not yet applied. Some will be unaware of the obligation; some need help with the process. There are at least 3,660 children currently or recently in care who qualify, but who are relying on local authorities to do the paperwork on their behalf and on time. Probably more.
The pandemic has drowned the sound of the clock ticking down to the deadline. People have been trapped abroad by travel restrictions. That can blemish a record of days spent on UK soil, spoiling an application by changing the calculation regarding “settled” and “pre-settled” status. (This is just one hellish sub-chamber in the bureaucratic maze.)
It is safe to presume a heap of cases will be bungled by the Home Office. Add those to deserving cases that won’t even be considered in time, and there could easily be hundreds of thousands of EU nationals falling into a legal void on 1 July. Some will get residency permission reinstated, but it will not be backdated. A stretch of unlawful migrant status will then haunt their record.
In theory, the grace period could easily be extended. In other areas where the timetable for Brexit implementation has felt tight – chiefly the Northern Ireland protocol – the UK is all for flexibility and cutting itself some slack. But the domestic political incentives there are different. Johnson is under pressure from his own side to ease the passage of agricultural goods crossing the Irish Sea. No Tory is demanding equivalent compassion for Polish care workers.
The settlement scheme is a machine that issues permissions to stay in Britain, but with suspicion as a byproduct. Any slips and it becomes a conveyor, whisking people into the Home Office’s “hostile environment”, churning out a caseload of trauma and injustice; a sequel to the Windrush scandal.
Confidence is hardly boosted by reports that officials recently misdirected a mailshot urging the wrong people to sort out their immigration status. Dual nationals with British passports were among the recipients of the letter warning that, among other threats, NHS access could be lost if prompt action was not taken.
Those who have been granted settled or pre-settled status find it is no guarantee against discrimination and exclusion. Private landlords, who are legally obliged to verify a tenant’s immigration status, are unfamiliar with the new categories and often unwilling to take a chance. The same goes for some employers and mortgage lenders. Any period of legal limbo can result in a loss of benefits, or bills for NHS services.
What will happen to EU nationals at border crossings is also unknown.
Travel volumes are low right now but the signs are not great. Visitors have been barred from entering the country; some have been held in detention centres. Most of those cases appear to be breaches of new visa requirements that should not, in theory, affect “settled” EU nationals. But some of them will have no paperwork to prove their privileged status, having been trapped overseas by the pandemic. Who would bet on them getting discretionary leniency from a Border Force officer at Heathrow?
None of this is intended as relitigation of the Brexit argument. Nor is it a claim that migration policy on the continent is a rolling showcase of Enlightenment values. Last week, Michel Barnier, plotting a long-shot candidacy in next year’s French presidential election, floated the idea of shutting his country’s borders completely. Sinister rhetoric about white Europe being overrun with dark-skinned foreigners has encroached much further into mainstream debate in many EU states than in Britain. The issue here is not abstract ideals of what Europe means or once meant, but present legal reality in Britain.
The Tories think their Brexit model is fair to EU nationals because it allows them to stay, as long as they meet the official criteria. What they do not grasp is the insecurity and injury inherent in the conversion from belonging in a country to being tolerated there; from being somewhere by right, in perpetuity, to being there on time-limited conditions. The more zealously those conditions are applied, the more it will hurt. The shift does not apply to British passport holders, but that does not mean we are unaffected. The political winds changed, and overnight millions of people who thought they had a kind of citizenship became instead a kind of alien. It is not only EU nationals who feel the chill in that wind.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
rushed through the first two pints to get through to “actual conversation” faster in my life.
This isn’t a permanent problem, and it is one that will be eased by the reopening of bars and restaurants over the next week, but it will take a while for the old muscle memory to come back. The sad fact is that in the small talk void, there’s been a necessary inversion of social hierarchy: suddenly, “adults who have recently taken on hobbies and got way too into them way too quickly” – previously, the worst people on Earth to talk to – are now vital to getting Britain back talking again. We need someone who, 16 weeks ago, didn’t care about running but now has a slightly gaunt jawline and ferocious opinions about elasticated gymwear just to start us off. They will become social pariahs again in a couple of months, as they should have always been, and go back to wherever it is they dwell – outside climbing centres, maybe, or wherever you can buy kayaking equipment – but for now we really need them.
The lack of small talk isn’t just a pub-garden problem, of course: it’s harder to find the energy to text or email or WhatsApp when the only thing that’s happened to you worth talking about lately is “that time you went to the supermarket and didn’t have to queue to get in”. The best small talk is an ongoing structural support for better conversations – think of it as the linguistic equivalent of stretching your quads out before actual exercise. It’s hard enough knowing what to say to friends I haven’t seen for months beyond “so you decided in the end not to do anything new or interesting with your hair” – and that goes double for the friends-of-friends I’m going to slowly start to bump into now socialising is opening back up again. The next time I go to a picnic I will simply have nothing to say to someone’s sister who I think tried to get on MasterChefonce but never actually made it past the auditions.
What’s the solution? My plan is to go absolutely, conversationally rogue: no more tentative, warm-up preconversation before the actual chat, just go straight in with my four-pint “Have you ever seen a dead body?” hard stuff. We have a once-in-a-generation chance to take linguistic norms by the reins and remould them into a shape that suits our modern society. I, for one, am going to take it.
Joel Golby is the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant
her neighbour.
The Winslet renaissance has been a wonder to witness, as she digs down in the dirt to play characters roughed up by life. Mare is a terrible mother, according to her daughter, she is mean and cold to her dates (poor Zabel!) and her ex-husband, she is fixated on work, to the extent that she accidentally rugby-tackles a man with dementia after mistaking him for a prowler, and she does bad things, like planting heroin on the mother of her grandson, in the hope that she won’t get custody of him. She sucks on her vape as if it is keeping her alive.
Yet despite Winslet’s magnificent performance, and the intricacies of the whodunnits at hand, Mare of Easttown almost lost me at episode four. I had been wary since the first episode ended with a slow, lingering shot on
Erin’s naked body – a screen cliche that should have been abandoned long ago, and seemed at odds with the show’s overall ethos. When episode four closed with the reveal that Katie and Missy had been kidnapped (and raped, we now know) by a then-mysterious man, I thought, oh, it’s this kind of show. But somehow, wrapping it up as quickly as it did, and saving the young women, got it back on track.
There are two episodes to go, which will, presumably, reveal who killed Erin, a mystery that now sees even more suspects in the frame. I knew James McArdle’s deacon was a villain, because you don’t cast McArdle to hang about in the background dispensing communion wafers. But he denies the murder, while admitting everything else that makes him look very suspicious. The twist that Erin’s friend Jess and short-fused ex-boyfriend Dylan are deeply involved in a cover-up came as another surprise. And now Billy, Erin’s cousin (I had to look that up; I was slightly lost in the Billy/John/Kenny family tree) is acting suspiciously about the time Erin came to stay with him. What are the odds that his abandoned bottle of Rolling Rock ends up in a bag, to be sent off by Mare for DNA testing?
Saturday Night Live spoofed Mare of Easttown a couple of weeks ago in a viciously accurate sketch called Murdur Durdur. Kate McKinnon played a “grizzled lady detective … with a very specific accent”; Mare of Easttown director Craig Zobel said he was “so flattered” by the tribute. But this week’s episode revealed a less predictable beast than Murdur Durdur predicted. Whether it fulfils this late burst of promise in its final two episodes remains to be seen, but I assume now that I will be gripped, and surprised, until the very end.