If we rewind to the heyday of free movement, the traffic was overwhelmingly one-way. The government estimated that three million people had moved to Britain from 2000 onwards, but since no one counted the figures properly it was hard to know precisely.
As it turned out, officials had got the estimates completely wrong. Under the “settled status” rules that allowed people from the EU to stay in Britain if they were already here, there were over seven million applications, or more than double the number expected, and given that some people decided not to stay, the real total could have been eight or even nine million.
And how many went from the UK to Europe? The UN estimates that there were about 900,000 UK citizens living in the rest of the EU in 2019, many of them retirees on the coasts of Spain or Portugal.
Young Poles, Hungarians and Italians flocked to Britain, assuming that they could make better money here than they could at home, or else to escape suffocating regulations that locked them out of the labour markets.
Likewise, under the Erasmus programme for students, statistics from 2018 show that 32,000 EU nationals were funded to come to the UK, while an estimated 17,000 British students went to study in the rest of the Continent.
Add it all up, and one point is clear. Young British people hardly ever went to work elsewhere in the EU for anything more than a summer job in the sunshine; neither did they study there.
They don’t speak the language, and there aren’t any jobs anyway. In effect, the EU dumped its youth unemployment on us, in the same way the Chinese dump cheap phones and cars.
It made sense for them, but it was a rotten deal for the UK. And now they want to do it all over again.
The broader point is that the UK needs to curb its addiction to imported labour. We have made a terrible job of it so far, but at least we have the right in principle to control our own borders. The last thing we need is another wave of immigrants from across the EU.
It would be great to be on better terms with Brussels, and there are parts of the Brexit agreement that could be improved. But the EU has just demonstrated that it needs us more than we need it, and it is willing to negotiate. The UK does not need a return to any form of free movement.
