It’s just a flicker of light at the end of a long, dark Brexit tunnel. But in the dead of winter, frankly we’ll take what we can get. Which is why Sadiq Khan’s backing at the weekend of a new “youth mobility” agreement with the EU – a kind of pre-Brexit-style right for young people to work and study abroad, with reciprocal rights for young Europeans here – will have ignited a long-forgotten spark of hope for many.
The longing to hear someone just admit that Brexit has hurt this country, and that the damage now urgently needs to be fixed, is so strong you can almost touch it in places. More than seven years in, remainers are sick and tired of being told to respect leave’s always wafer-thin mandate, especially now that 51% of Britons (and 61% of Londoners, according to YouGov) say they’d vote to rejoin the EU given a chance and 42% would like at least to re-enter the single market. What Khan said is therefore a classic example of something Labour still daren’t say nationally, but increasingly risks being punished for not saying in places such as London.
The capital isn’t just laid-back about immigration from Europe – it’s built on it, requiring a steady flow of young people from all over the globe not just to staff its cafes and restaurants and hospitals and schools, but to make it feel like the cosmopolitan place it always used to pride itself on being. London’s universities were a honeypot for Europeans before Brexit, its tech sector needs their skills and the City needs their business, so why should it have to tiptoe respectfully around something that’s estimated so far to have cost the capital about £30bn?
But if Khan’s talk of a government omertà on Brexit sounded to some like a simultaneous attack on the creeping caution of his own party, that’s a misreading of what he was trying to do in fielding questions from a Fabian Society audience at the weekend. Similarly wide of the mark is the idea that this was some kind of choreographed dipping of Labour toes in the waters of rejoining. The mayor has never made a secret of his views on Europe – he’s been arguing for Britain to rejoin the customs union for years – and isn’t demanding a nationwide loosening of the reins on freedom of movement.
Friends say he understands perfectly well that other parts of the country don’t necessarily see this the way Londoners do: he just wants the flexibility to do what he thinks the capital needs, possibly via a new visa scheme that could be introduced without needing to reopen the Brexit deal. However unlikely that is to happen, talking up the idea certainly isn’t going to do him any harm ahead of this May’s London elections, which may be trickier than they look given the number of natural Labour voters now seething at the party’s stance on Gaza.
But he must know as well as anyone else why Keir Starmer remains shy of a subject on which the Labour party has repeatedly been electorally bitten. Even a region or sector-specific visa scheme – easier said than devised in practice – would still be likely to push up immigration numbers nationwide, an eternally sensitive issue in some parts of the country where Labour is desperate to win back seats. And it doesn’t take much for the Tories to start claiming – as party chair Richard Holden did the minute Khan spoke up – that Labour is trying to drag the country back into the EU by stealth (though chance would be a fine thing, frankly).
All that said, however, there is a long if invariably prickly tradition of city mayors pushing the progressive boundaries further than national governments are comfortable with, only for the rest of the country to discover that it can live with the results surprisingly comfortably. Think of Ken Livingstone allowing gay couples to register their partnerships formally back in 2001, paving the way to equal marriage rights that barely raise a flicker of an eyebrow now. What London wants today, middle England is often grudgingly willing to accept tomorrow.
There’s something particularly poignant, too, about calling for freedom of movement to be restored first for young people, whose horizons have been cruelly shrunk in recent years, first by Brexit and second by a pandemic hitting just at the age they should have been out exploring the world. Frankly, they’ve earned a break. And so, after seven years of being called snobs, fearmongers and enemies of the people, have remainers everywhere.
Intentionally or not, Khan has given remainers what they needed at the beginning of an election year, which is the sense that someone gets it. Although, if anyone should understand the itch to be free, to chart your own economic destiny without being held back by people you fundamentally disagree with – well, shouldn’t it be leavers?
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
