Young and mobile

UK-EU Youth mobility and the errors of the political right

The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) recently published a report in which they called for the introduction of a Youth Mobility Scheme between the UK and the EU. This echoes last year’s calls by the EU Commission for a similar scheme. Details may differ, but any such scheme would likely mean exempting young adults from visa requirements, and allowing them to move from an EU country to the UK or vice versa under something akin to the old freedom of movement rules.

It is probably not going to happen. Nonetheless, some people on the British Right are already up in arms about it, fearing that Britain will soon be swamped with young Southern Europeans taking away career opportunities from young Brits, betraying the Brexit vote.

With everything else that’s going on right now, a mobility scheme which may never happen is admittedly not the biggest issue of our time. The reason why I bother writing about it at all is that I see it as an issue which brings out the worst tendencies of the contemporary British Right: mindless Brexitism, bad economics, and complacency about Britain’s relative economic standing. Those tendencies deserve to be called out.

Mindless Brexitism

Brexitism is not the same as the belief that Brexit was, on balance, the right choice. That is a perfectly legitimate perspective (which I don’t share, but that’s not the point).

Brexitism is the desire to constantly refight to 2016 Referendum, and to be “more Brexity” than the next guy.

You can be most passionate supporter of Brexit in the land, and still be in favour of a Youth Mobility Scheme with the EU. Being pro-Brexit does not mean that you are obliged to reflexively oppose anything that involves the EU in any way.

Before the Great Brexit Culture War, British Euroscepticism was never like that. In 2005, even UKIP still supported a Swiss-style arrangement between Britain and the EU, and in 2015, even Nigel Farage was still full of praise for the Icelandic arrangement (although he also said that he did not want the same model for Britain). It was only after the Referendum that Hard Brexiteers started to claim that anything other than the hardest of Hard Brexits was just EU membership by another name, and thus anti-democratic, elitist, and “unsound”.

Imagine you could travel back to 2015, and speak at a UKIP conference. Imagine telling them that ten years in the future, Britain would be outside of the EU, outside of the Single Market, outside of the Customs Union, outside of the Common Agricultural Policy and outside of the Common Fisheries Policy, that free movement of people would generally end, but that it might be retained for the under-30s. Every single person in that audience would be utterly delighted. Not one single person would get upset about the prospect of a Youth Mobility Scheme. So why get upset about it now?

Bad economics

What would be the economic effect of a Youth Mobility Scheme?

That is not a speculative question. We had free movement of people with the European Economic Area until just four years ago, and the effects have been well studied. We can take that as a starting point, and extrapolate.

EEA nationals in the UK are, in aggregate terms, fiscal net contributors, meaning, they pay more in taxes than they consume in public services and benefits in cash and kind. There is no evidence of a negative impact on either the employment rates or average wage levels of the British-born population, although there is some evidence that low-wage migration has a small negative effect on the wages of low-skilled Brits. There is no evidence of a negative effect on investment in training or physical capital either.

None of this is surprising. The idea that immigrants “steal jobs” from natives, or “undercut wages”, is false. Immigrants add to the supply of labour, but also to the demand for it. The aggregate outcome should be broadly neutral, albeit with variation across sectors and professions.

So much for the old free movement rules, which were in place until 2021, and which applied to the population as a whole. A Youth Mobility Scheme would differ from that insofar as, by definition, it would only apply to young adults, i.e. the people who are least likely to use public services, or rely on benefits (which they would not be eligible for anyway). If the old free movement rules were economically beneficial (or at worst, economically neutral), then this must be equally true of a future Youth Mobility Scheme, or more so.

Complacency

I have long had the theory that part of the reason for Britain’s relative economic decline is that not enough people recognise that such a decline is even happening. Especially on the political Right, too many people still think of Britain as the Switzerland of the North Sea, when it is really anything but.

I first noticed this in 2016, when a lot of Brexiteers still talked about how Britain’s irresistible economic pull factors made free movement unsustainable. Of course everyone wants to move to Britain! Who wouldn’t? Where else would you go?

There was once some truth in that perception. For example, EU enlargement really did initially lead to a huge influx of Eastern Europeans to the UK, because at the time, the income gap was still massive. But this perception was already out of date in 2016, and it is certainly no longer true now.

Let’s have a look at the latest figures. Britain is poorer than the Western European average. Britain is poorer than all of its immediate neighbours. Yes, Britain is still richer than Eastern Europe and Southern Europe – but the gap is nothing like what people on the Right seem to imagine it is.

GDP per capita (PPP), 2024 in % of UK level:

• Slovakia 73%

• Portugal 79%

• Poland 83%

• Spain 88%

• Slovenia 89%

• Lithuania 90%

• Czech Republic 91%

• Italy 97%

• France 105%

• Western Europe 107%

• Germany 113%

• Sweden 115%

• Austria 118%

• Netherlands 130%

• Switzerland 153%

-International Monetary Fund (2025)

The idea that Britain is a beacon of prosperity, is which everyone is desperate to move to, reveals a delusional complacency. And it is not a harmless delusion, because it shapes attitudes towards economic policy. Telling yourself that you are far richer than you truly are is not a good basis for sound economic decision making.

Conclusion

A UK-EU Youth Mobility Scheme as proposed by the BCC is unlikely to happen, and even if it did, it would not be a game changer. I would support it, but I cannot get terribly excited about it.

Nonetheless, the hysterical condemnations by parts of the political Right are symptomatic of some of the ways in which the British Right is currently going wrong. If Continuity Remainers need to move on from the Brexit culture wars, so do the die-hard Continuity Brexiteers on the Right. They also need to ditch the zero-sum mentality when it comes to the economic effects of immigration, and above all, they need to stop deluding themselves about Britain’s relative economic position. The British Right was at its best a generation ago, when they were brutally honest with themselves about Britain’s economic decline, and pained by it in a way that goes beyond pure economics. That sort of right-winger would be proud if young people from the EU want to come here, because they would see that as an honest compliment rather than a threat. This is the spirit which the Right of the 2020s needs to rediscover.