With regard to Matthew d’Ancona’s article on latest Brexit negotiations (“Brussels will squeeze us till the pips squeak” ES 18th October 2017) there is still one initiative that can break the current impasse and the gloom that surrounds it. The Irish border is currently insoluble until issues of the UK’s main borders are resolved; the money game will rumble on to be played down eventually, EU style, to the wire when all the clocks are stopped to meet an agreed deadline suitable to the political needs of the EU Commission and the Council of Ministers.
Yet the most intransigent enemy of the current proposed UK offer is the European Parliament which could have the final veto on the text of any Withdrawal Agreement. But the EP’s main concern, expressed quite forcibly in the resolution passed 2 weeks ago, was the fate of EU citizens in this country. The current settled status option promoted so vigorously by the Home Office with community leaders and embassies is dead in the water unless it is guaranteed by international supervision recognized by the European Court of Justice and covers all EU citizens currently living here, along with their children and partners.
Even after Theresa May’s letter today scrapping Comprehensive Sickness Insurance and easing the passage of registration for those with permanent residence, the rights of large sections of the 3.2 million EU citizens will still not be guaranteed. Basically she is only removing barriers which she herself had put up. The hostile atmosphere built up quite deliberately by Home Office staff towards EU citizens in the last 2 years have convinced EU citizens here, UK citizens abroad and broadly public opinion in EU countries generally that there is no certain future for EU citizens after Brexit without an internationally approved guaranteed status for all of them. After all, this is a finite group of people who have legally chosen to live here, set up families and contribute massively to the British economy and to the country’s social and cultural fabric. The UK has obligations to them, moral and legal. There are UK precedents here. These families should be given the same “en bloc” comprehensive guarantee of permanent settlement here that was given earlier to groups to whom the UK had moral and legal obligations such as 250,000 Polish soldiers and their dependents in 1947 and 27,000 Ugandan Asians in 1972, but this should also now be guaranteed by a ring-fenced international agreement.
Not only will such an offer give assurance of permanence to those EU families living here for so many decades, it would also ensure a reciprocal positive response to the future of 1 million UK residents living in the EU and remove the embarrassment of watching so many vulnerable EU citizens being deported under haphazard Immigration Rules. In fact such an offer would be a signal to the EU that negotiations are being taken seriously by this government and that leave can be given now to start those future trade talks.
Theresa May has stressed that no EU citizens will be deported and that no EU families need to be separated by Brexit, but she is constantly being outflanked by her Foreign Secretary’s restated new red lines. Yet curiously Boris Johnson has always been keen to stress, during and after the EU referendum, that all EU citizens in this country should be safe, and he repeated that on Tuesday at the Polish-British Belvedere reception in the Foreign Office. Now he can give himself and his Prime Minister the free rein to announce an EU citizens’ rights resolution that would leap the current distrust and break the deadlock on the remaining negotiations. You can bargain over finances, over trade, over security, over agriculture, but not over peoples' lives.
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