Freedom of movement is older than the EU
Britain is no stranger to freedom of movement, which is older than the EU. Andy Burnham now says he wants to to see the idea discussed openly as he seeks to repair the economic damage done by a decade of Brexit.
Britain was and is the only European country with full unfettered freedom of movement with an EU member state, namely Ireland. It was instituted a century ago, when Ireland won its independence from British rule. Ever since, European citizens from Ireland have been able to visit, work in, and settle in the United Kingdom.
In 1948, the British Nationality Act allowed any Commonwealth citizen to travel to the UK and work here. This allowed Australians, Canadian and New Zealand citizens to enjoy freedom of movement to Britain, enriching professions from journalism to law.
The legendary Windrush generation also arrived from the West Indies under freedom of movement to help rebuild Britain after the war. They were followed by Commonwealth citizens from Cyprus, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and other countries who worked as doctors and nurses. The British royal colleges strictly limited entry into their closed shop professions to keep salaries as high as possible. The NHS would have never have become the health care provider for the British people without freedom of movement for citizens from independent foreign nations.
Our bus drivers, railway porters, care home workers, owners of affordable restaurants and 24/7 corner shop proprietors arrived under freedom of movement. This was to our mutual benefit as they earned money, bought homes and created families that enriched the country.
Of course there were some negatives to freedom of movement. Over 1,000 members of Britain’s security forces, including 650 serving soldiers were killed by Irish militant nationalists. The IRA believed the false ideology of all nationalisms that if the ballot box did not immediately deliver what they wanted they were justified in murdering opponents, the police and soldiers sent in to keep the peace.
Even at the height of the IRA killing of innocent civilians as well as security forces, well within living memory, no-one ever suggested in Whitehall that freedom of movement between Britain and Ireland should be suspended.
As politicians, most notoriously Enoch Powell, discovered they could win profile by attacking immigration and predicting “rivers of blood” if migrants were allowed to work and live in Britain, these calls found echoes in newspapers founded by migrants like Rupert Murdoch and Lord Beaverbrook. So politicians passed successive nationality laws, usually based on skin colour, to weaken the long established tradition of UK freedom of movement.
After the end of fascist dictatorships in southern Europe and communism in East Europe, Britain welcomed migrants from Poland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and France who worked hard as agricultural workers, helping to look after British children, and like the Irish, often filling Catholic churches. The new European migrants kept a foot back home and as the European nations that sent workers to Britain became full EU and NATO members they became prosperous. Their citizens no longer needed to come to Britain to work.
This did not lessen the political attacks on migrants whether on the basis of skin colour or a non-Christian religion. The Federation of Poles of Great Britain published a dossier of headlines in 2008 from one paper alone, the Daily Mail. Before 1939 the Daily Mail (which once carried a front page splash praising Adolf Hitler with the blaring headline “HOORAY FOR THE BLACKHIRTS”) campaigned to stop Jews entering Britain from Nazi persecution. The paper argued that Jewish professionals from Europe were taking jobs that could be done by true-born Englishmen.
In 2008 the Daily Mail ran 100 headlines smearing Poles like“POLISH MURDERER”, “POLISH RAPIST”, “POLISH FRAUDSTER”. The stories were accurate as migrants commit crimes like local people do, but the Daily Mail in its drive to whip up hate against Europeans in Britain focused on their Polish nationality.
This culminated in the anti-European vote of Brexit. Today the ongoing damage to the UK’s economy is clear. Brits are now the only Europeans who do not enjoy freedom of movement to make money, or study or fall in love and live as of right in a country other than their own.
Recently there has been mass freedom of movement under Tory Brexit ministers. As labour market supply crashed in the years after Brexit Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak responded by creating freedom of movement for millions of Africans and Asians to enter the UK to do the work that previously Europeans had done up to 2016. Their arrival 2021-24 in working class communities, often with high levels of joblessness especially amongst younger men and women, has opened the way for the new ethonationalist politics of Reform and Restore.
Burnham, his ministers, Labour as a party and the Liberals need to explain that Britain has a long history of freedom of movement. If some Europeans who go to Mass on Sunday enter the Labour market to join the so-called Boriswave African and Asian immigrants, it will not mean the end of Britain.
With Glasgow Archdiocese announcing it has to close half the city-region’s churches, it would be no bad thing if Catholic Europeans are made once again to feel at home in Britain.
Denis MacShane is the former Minister of Europe and was Labour MP for Rotherham for 18 years.
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