The reason why the UK works as a country and the EU
doesn’t work is fundamentally linguistic. Lots of people from Scotland live and
work happily in other parts of the UK. We have all likewise met people from
England, Wales and Northern Ireland who have moved to Scotland without any
difficulty. Most of us could do more or less the same job anywhere else in the
UK. We could go to the same sort of shops and pubs. We wouldn’t find it
difficult to make new friends or perhaps even find a wife or a husband. There
are only small differences between the various parts of the UK. It would be
easy to adapt to a move.
It is this that above all defines what a successful
nation state is. Australians, Americans and Japanese can all likewise move
about their own countries with ease. It is for this reason too that they all
have a single currency that works well. If one part of Japan suffers from a
natural disaster, other Japanese people are happy for their taxes to be used to
help. If one part of Australia suffers from recession people can easily move to
another part where there are jobs. The reason for this is that the citizens of
each of these countries have a common identity that has been forged by history
and by the fact that they are similar. It is this that the EU lacks.
Few of us could move to another European country
with ease and do exactly the same job that we do now. A British doctor could
not easily move to Italy and begin treating patients from day one. A British
teacher could not get a job in a French state school and begin teaching history.
The reason is obvious: language. Even if a teacher spoke perfect French, he
would still have to learn the French curriculum. Even if a doctor spoke very
good Italian, he’d still have to learn the Italian words for medical terms, the
variants of Italian spoken by his patients and how the health service in Italy
worked.
For most Brits therefore working in the EU has involved
either doing a job that is at such a high level that English can be used or
working at such a low level that only rudimentary foreign language skills are
required. The vast majority of Brits living in the EU are doing so because they
want to live somewhere warmer, not because they do a job that involves speaking
a foreign language.
It is for this reason that membership of the EU has
always been a bit of a one way street. Thousands of EU students come to
Scotland and at the moment get free tuition. How many Scots study in Slovenia
or Greece? Hundreds of thousands of French people work in London. How many
Brits work in Paris? While Latvians in Britain can claim child benefit for
their kids in Latvia, those few Brits who moved to Latvia would find that the
Latvian state would not be nearly as generous.
Why can EU citizens easily move to Britain while it
is hard for us to move to their country? The answer again is language. Is it
that Europeans are better at learning foreign languages than the Brits? Perhaps
they are, but it has more to do with the fact that they are all learning one
foreign language, English. If we wanted to live in the whole of the EU we would
have to learn 24. There is no language that a British child can learn that will
be useful in more than two or three EU countries. Almost no-one speaks French
in Poland. German is not well understood in Greece or Spain.
The fact that we all speak English in the UK is a
benefit to each of us and to our economy, but it also has a downside. The
second language of the whole world is English and this means that millions of
them would love to live and work in a country that speaks English.
It is for this reason that the EU has never been a
particularly good deal for the UK. In order to maintain our character of being
a nation state, we need to maintain the fact that British citizens can move
anywhere in the UK and still feel that they are in Britain. If any part of
Britain begins to feel linguistically or culturally alien, if it were to become
difficult for me to move to another British town because the people living
there were not much like me, then the bonds that unite us all would begin to
sever.
The EU facilitated the mass movement of EU citizens
to Britain. This was largely one way traffic. There have of course been
benefits to the British economy. We have needed many of these workers. But it
has also meant that it has become much harder for low skilled British people to
compete. Near where I live there is a fish factory. Twenty years ago the only
people working there were Scots. Now the only people working there are Eastern
Europeans. It would be difficult for a British person to get a job in this
factory, because the common language used is Eastern European. What do the
Scots who might have worked in this factory do now?
We will probably still welcome many people from the
EU after Brexit. They usually integrate very well and within a generation will
be indistinguishable from other Brits, but it would be far better if were able
to choose who and how many could come here.
The greater one way traffic that the EU has
facilitated however is from people living outside the EU. How many Brits choose
to live and work in Sudan? How many decide to retire to Syria? So there is
nothing reciprocal at all about the mass movement of people from the countries
surrounding the Mediterranean and still less from further afield. What is peculiar
also is that just as it would be relatively easy for me to move to Australia
because I speak the same language, it would be far easier for people from this
region to move to another country where they can easily make themselves
understood. But they prefer to live in the EU. It’s impossible to live anywhere
else. Moreover, they know that once they set foot in the EU, it will probably
be just a matter of time before they gain either citizenship or the right to
remain in the EU. Once they have this they can move anywhere they please.
Naturally they would like to go somewhere where there are lots of other people
like them and where they can use the English they learned in school.
So long as the UK has to follow EU law, so long as
we are constrained by the rights that the EU confers on anyone entering the EU
whether legally or illegally, we will be unable to decide who lives in the UK. Brexiteers
realised that we were losing control of our country. Parts of Britain were
becoming unrecognisable from even a few years earlier. So long as we remained
in the EU there was nothing that could be done. This is why UK law must be
supreme and why Parliament must be able to decide who has the right to come to
Britain, and who has the right to stay.
There is so much negativity about Brexit. We must
not lose sight of the benefits. Most Brits are fair minded, but we want two-way
traffic and mutual benefit rather than feeling that we are being taken
advantage of. The EU wants our money but doesn’t much want to cooperate. It
wants us to continue to defend them, but would still like to punish us for
daring to leave. We can do better.
I would far rather have a reciprocal arrangement
with Canada, Australia, New Zealand and perhaps even the USA. We all speak the
same language. We could all easily live and work in each other’s countries. We
all have more or less the same kind of law, the same ideas about democracy and
freedom. Wouldn’t it be better to deepen the relationship with those with whom
we have something in common rather than those we merely live next door to? At
least it wouldn’t be a one way street.
