The madness of snubbing Erasmus+

I have been told that Baron Douglas Jay, the post-war Labour politician, one-time president of the board of trade and fervent anti-European who was the first advocate for a referendum, would never travel abroad without his own packet of Kellogg’s cornflakes. After all, who would want a warm croissant and some delicious ham and cheese for breakfast?

Jay’s breakfast has always seemed to me to be the perfect metaphor for the mentality of the anti-EU mob. Stuck in the 1950s traditionalists who preferred home comforts to the offerings of those shifty continentals.

It says something about politics today and how the EU and its member states are still viewed by so many people that it is not difficult to imagine Sir Keir Starmer packing some of those mini packets of Kellogg’s for his current trip to the continent. Not that Starmer isn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate the food and culture of foreign parts – he’s a north Londoner, for God’s sake – but just because it might play well with the zealots that he apparently feels it necessary to appease at every step.

Sir Keir flew to Germany on Tuesday for a bilateral chat with the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, but his spin doctors have made it clear that this is not some kind of pandering to the EU, betrayal of Brexit kind of visit. And thus they have announced that they intend to continue to undermine the education of millions of young people by not rejoining the Erasmus+ scheme.

This scheme allowed students across Europe to spend some time at a foreign university and have it count towards their degree. It was so uncontroversial that Boris Johnson and a whole load of other Brexit campaigners promised it would continue if we left the EU, only to drag us out at the earliest opportunity and try to set up a UK-only version which is but a pale shadow of the original.

Erasmus+ is also one of the few parts of the EU’s offering that we could rejoin tomorrow. The European Commission is all in favour of us being back in, as are the member states. It is only the UK which refuses to join.

Given that the whole point of this trip is apparently to “reset” our relations with Europe and “turn a corner on Brexit”, you might think that rejoining a nice, useful, scheme like Erasmus+ would be just the kind of gesture that would go down well on the continent. But no, instead we are apparently holding talks in Germany aimed at better security and encouraging trade across the North Sea.

Someone might want to tell the PM that trade talks are an EU competency and although I am sure that the German chancellor will make some nice noises, there is virtually nothing he can do about the issue. Someone at some point is going to have to put their head over the parapet and make some sensible and entirely logical proposals to actually make things work better. The whole thing is going to take six months at least, while Erasmus+ could be handled at one brisk meeting.

Sir Keir will soon be on his way to Paris for more talks and to attend the opening ceremony of the Paralympics. Let us hope he has remembered to take his cornflakes.