Labour’s stance on freedom of movement for 18 to 30 year-olds is unfathomable - Yorkshire Post Letters

The EU announcement of willingness to reach an arrangement giving young British people between 18 and 30 the opportunity to live, study and work freely throughout the whole of the European Economic Area is to be warmly welcomed.

This would be through the extension of the Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS). Precise details of the offer are available online but would allow young adults without dependents an initial four-year period of residence abroad.

This is exactly the sort of arrangement which could go some way to restoring opportunities for cultural, social, linguistic and economic enrichment which were cruelly and callously torn away from my grandchildren when the Tories with Labour support brought life-enhancing freedom of movement to an end. As an aside UK citizens in Northern Ireland continue to enjoy those rights.

My excitement and elation were short-lived however as I hadn’t reckoned with the dismissive negative response from an inward-looking Labour Party whose spokesman decried such a scheme as being ‘synonymous with freedom of movement.’ It isn’t. But it is good enough for now.

Most Labour voters apparently didn’t vote for Brexit and many Labour candidates recognise that the whole Brexit saga has been a disaster. Socialism and internationalism always went in tandem. What’s changed?

Labour isn’t keeping pace with the warming public approach to deeper ties with Europe. The leadership is more concerned with the diminishing number of voters who despair when Polish is spoken in the park. We live in a city whose main university is led by a Dutch vice-chancellor and whose football team has a German manager.

Yet Labour refuses to allow a lad from Lille and a lass from Leeds to do bar work in each other’s country for reasons that are inexplicable. Sir Keir is behind the public mood. Including a YMS and a return to the Erasmus student exchange programme in Labour’s manifesto could be vote-winners.

The writer has frequently asked in these august columns how denying young people the right to move around the continent freely protects the English working class? No answer is ever forthcoming.

Labour is itself unlikely to offer a rational defence of their isolationist stance. Our local Labour candidate has made a valiant effort to win my vote but wasted her time as I’ll never support a Labour Party that denies exciting, exhilarating experiences to young British people.