Youth mobility scheme with EU will help to right the Brexit wrongs

When is an EU-UK wide youth mobility scheme not an EU-UK wide youth mobility scheme? When the Westminster government says it’s not. Even when it really looks like it is!

As one-liners go this is not exactly a zinger. The Schrödinger’s cat of international movement policy reform is not going to have the crowd calling out for more. Unless Bob Mortimer delivers it. But the change it signifies is welcome. Even if that change is, inexplicably, being denied just now.

The scheme would allow people under 30 to move and work freely between the UK and EU countries for a limited period of time. At present, that period of time looks like being a year. Or it doesn’t. Though it does.

The UK already has similar schemes with a number of nations, including New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan and Uruguay. Which are all quite far away. The EU has the benefit of being closer – comedy and geography for you here. The wider issue is that this is the first major piece of pro-movement legislation between the UK and EU since Brexit.

Of course it’s a positive thing, to allow younger people opportunities to live and work and challenge themselves away from home. The renowned historian Peter Frankopan said recently he felt all young people should be paid to live a year abroad. Which sounds great but does feel a little heavy on the public purse. Also, there might be more take-up for spaces on Frankopan’s paid gap years along the Med than in an industrial town on the Ruhr. 

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One of Brexit’s great limitations was the shuttering of opportunity, the limiting of horizons that had previously been wider. You might argue that those opportunities to live and work in the EU, beyond Britain, were middle-class in nature anyway. But that is broad, reductive and incorrect.

Things like the Erasmus scheme helped many of us who would not otherwise have been able to experience what we did. And besides, by limiting that choice, it has only served to make things, in those further-away nations, more expensive for those with less.

Here we are then with the new scheme. It’s not entirely clear why the government is being so coy about it. Even though it is believed to be close to a done deal, do they fear that if they’d shown any positive thaw towards the EU ahead of the council elections they’d lose more votes to Reform? That didn’t exactly play out well.

Neither does it stack up. Recent YouGov polling on this scheme showed over two-thirds more people across the country were in favour than against. Even in Clacton, in Nigel Farage’s constituency, more people were in favour than against.

And as polling Big Issue has carried out shows, poverty is a key and driving concern for voters. Anger that the government has not used its majority to get stuck into poverty yet is driving people from Labour. Reform are clearly beneficiaries. So long as Labour doesn’t get to grips with that, they allow space for Reform to explain what Reform see as the causes of poverty – and allows them then to explain how they’d fix it, when Labour can’t.

It’s possible that Labour are keeping their powder dry ahead of a major conference next week. On 19 May there is a summit with UK and EU leaders. They’re going to look at security mostly, we are told, and potentially something around fishing. It may be that the government want to present the EU-UK youth mobility scheme as a win to show a positive outcome from the talks. If that is so, it feels like a minor victory.

Labour have a whopping majority. We all understand that money is tight, that things sometimes take time
and that politics has a lot of wheels within wheels.

If they don’t start shifting those wheels and moving through the gears, it’s going to be a long parliament for them, and us. Though, if you’re under 30, there is something to look towards.

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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