The war against the youth mobility scheme is embarrassing

The progress may be glacial, but at least the glacier of youth mobility is finally moving forward.

Following months of denial, the government is now letting it be known that it is in favour of a reciprocal youth mobility agreement with the European Union after all. The news was pretty inevitable ahead of the Brexit reset summit next month, because the EU was insisting tht a mobility scheme had to be done as a sign of good faith.

The actual amount of youth mobility involved is likely to be limited in scope, however. The right to work, study, train or volunteer in the UK or EU will be available strictly to under-30s, and with the Home Office desperate to keep immigration numbers down, any visits might even be limited to just one year so they don’t turn up in the official figures.

But all that is up for negotiation. The EU’s starting point is visas lasting up to four years, with no overall cap on the number issued. It will also demand an exemption from the NHS surcharge that migrants have to pay (currently £1,035 per year or £776 for students and under-18s). And it wants the same university tuition fees as British students pay – currently international students have to stump up three times as much

Youth mobility is a perfectly sensible, useful and harmless policy. It should not be in the slightest bit controversial but almost certainly will be.

Already the Tories and Reform are lining up to cry treason, Kemi Badenoch claims it will be just “another avenue which people might use to game the system,” and that Labour “doesn’t know how to negotiate”. Coming from the party that negotiated the hopeless Trade and Co-operation Agreement, this is utterly shameless.

The Tory leader also asks, “Where are all these people they want to bring in going to work?” She might like to ask the hospitality industry, the construction sector, social services and the health sector, among many other sectors of the economy suffering from worker and skills shortages. All would jump at the chance of having European labour to fill the gaps.

Nigel Farage thinks youth mobility is “completely against what the Brexit vote demanded”, which is just tosh. We all remember being told during the referendum that we would stay in the Single Market and there was no threat to our freedom to live and work in Europe.

It all makes you wonder why the Brexit camp is so nervous. Surely leaving the EU has been such a success that inviting thousands of Europeans a year to visit Global Britian, can only be a good thing? Won’t they go home inspired by our newfound freedoms and our dynamic economy, which has been turbo-charged by removing the dead hand of Brussels from around our throat?

Won’t they return to the EU demanding the same freedoms and opportunities they have experienced in the UK? Won’t they devote their lives to ensuring France, Germany and all the rest break free too? Won’t this scheme indoctrinate generations of Jesuitical believers in Brexit to return home and undermine the EU from within?

Perhaps not, let’s be realistic, it is far more likely the thousands of British under-30s travelling to the EU will come home with some very difficult questions to ask Kemi and Nigel. Perhaps that is why they are so set against the idea.