Hansard

I am afraid that I have to leave very shortly but, before I go, I want to talk a bit about youth mobility. It strikes me that there is a huge disconnect between the UK and the EU, which goes back to the disconnect that has been there the whole way along of the non-UK parts of the EU seeing the EU fundamentally as a peace project in bringing nations together, preventing war in Europe, creating mutual understanding and so on. Mobility, and youth mobility in particular, is an emotional thing for the EU, which of course it is not in the UK. The UK has pretty much always seen the EU and the single market as an economic issue—does it make us rich or does it make us poorer? For the moment, we have just made the assessment, “Well, it makes us poorer but we do not care because of the politics”, not wanting to go back to the leave or remain divide, and with the Labour Party not wanting to upset the red wall and give Nigel Farage a way in. Indeed, we see that in youth mobility. The whole youth mobility issue came up because the previous Conservative Government was running around Europe, talking to EU member states that it liked, particularly Germany and France, and trying to persuade them to do bilateral youth mobility deals. Although the Conservative Party will probably never admit that publicly, that is what was happening. That set the whole process off, because the EU Commission decided, “This is our competence, not your competence”. When it came out with its proposal in March, that was not really anything to do with the UK; it was simply saying to member states, “You need to get back in line because this is our competence, not your competence”. That is why it announced what it did back in March. 10:00 That had the effect, in the run-up to the UK general election, of making the issue public and giving red meat to the right-wing press, forcing the Labour Party and the Conservative Party to say they would not go near the issue in the run-up to a general election, and it made Labour state a position. Since the election, the EU has put forward different proposals, which are somewhat reduced from the ones that it proposed before. I have said to people from the EU many times that it is really unhelpful that this debate has become a notable, front-page issue in the UK. In the UK, the most difficult thing in the whole Brexit debate has been mobility and the perception that freedom of movement was taking people’s jobs and keeping their wages down. Regardless of how true that was, that was the perception and the story that has been put forward by Nigel Farage and others on the right. That story has never really been countered—or certainly not strongly enough—by people in the Labour Party or others on the left in the UK. Therefore, freedom of movement is the most difficult issue. Even though youth mobility is completely different to freedom of movement, it sounds too similar to too many people. When Maroš Šefcovic talked about it publicly in Brussels recently, he started talking about it as a youth opportunity scheme rather than a youth mobility scheme. I have advised multiple people to do that in the EU, because even just using a word that is not a long word that starts with the letter M is helpful when describing it. It would be good if they can continue on that basis. The other thing that I have said to people in the EU is to stop talking about youth mobility as a stand-alone issue and to just talk about it in the wider reset as part of a piece. They should not use the words “mobility” or “movement”. If they talk about it as opportunities or an exchange programme or something, they are much more likely to get what they want. On what Scotland can do, I do not know what freedom of manoeuvre you have to do anything, particularly when it comes to university education or exchange programmes. There is the slight workaround for school trips, whereby people can come in on their identity cards rather than their passports. Would it be possible for Scotland to do something similar for people who are at university age, even if only for a month or a term or something like that? I simply do not know, but you could investigate that. It is hard to say what the long-term impact will be on services, trade and GDP. Yesterday, or this morning, I read that we are losing somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 EU nationals from the UK, just because, over time, people who were here have decided to go home or somewhere else, and people are not being replaced, in part because it is much more expensive for someone from the EU to come to the UK than vice versa. There are fewer barriers for somebody here wanting to go to the EU on a digital nomad visa, for example, or to study, whereas people coming here are not allowed to bring family members or spouses, and there is also the national health service surcharge. We deliberately make it very difficult in lots of ways for people to come to the UK. It is understandable that a European person—Polish, Romanian, Portuguese, French or whatever—who is looking at different options of where to go will decide to go to Germany or Spain, because that is logistically so much easier than jumping through the many hoops to come to the UK. There might be things that the Scottish Government could do to remove some of those barriers. I do not know. I apologise for having to leave. Thank you for the invitation to join you today—it has been a pleasure to meet you all.