Five years ago Boris Johnson ended Britain’s participation in the Europe-wide Erasmus programme, which has organised exchanges for students across the continent since 1987, and apprenticeships since 2014. Johnson said it had been a “tough decision” but that the scheme did not offer the UK value for money.
He was wrong on both counts. It was not a tough decision so much as a bad one, in bad faith, ignoring an assurance he had given 11 months earlier that Britain would stay in the scheme – which did offer value for money including a net benefit to the UK, according to one study, of £243m annually.
Johnson’s decision has now been reversed by the methodical and unflashy Nick Thomas-Symonds, who announced last week that Britain would rejoin Erasmus and that more than 100,000 young people a year would be able to benefit, starting in 2027. The reversal is an object lesson in the damage that can be done by ideological decision-making – and the good that can come of taking politics seriously.
Being a part of Erasmus is in many ways EU membership in microcosm. It’s expensive but worth it. Britain will have to pay £570m to rejoin, but if the past is any guide that will prove a good investment, earned back in the form of European students’ spending in the UK and new income streams for British universities.
It will enrich British cultural life and strengthen the UK’s vaunted science sector
Rejoining will raise the hackles of people who dislike foreigners having access to the UK economy except as tourists or investors, but it will enrich British cultural life and strengthen the UK’s vaunted science sector in particular.
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It is possible that more EU students will visit the UK than vice versa because of the attractiveness of study in the English language, but the programme will offer a dizzying range of opportunities in hundreds of European universities for young Britons who take advantage of it.
Rejoining is also a vital step in a broader reset process, which critics on both sides of the Brexit divide said was stalling. It isn’t. Significant further steps are likely next year. With a coyness characteristic of Labour’s EU policy pronouncements, in paragraph five of a six-paragraph joint statement Thomas-Symonds and his EU counterpart said they aim by the time of the next EU-UK summit to “conclude negotiations on the youth experience scheme, a common sanitary and phytosanitary area and on linking our emissions trading systems”.
The youth experience scheme would let 18- to 30-year-olds live, work and study throughout the EU-UK area for a limited period, expanding horizons of young people generally as the Erasmus programme does for students and apprentices. A new sanitary and phytosanitary area would dramatically streamline cross-border trade in food. For good measure. the statement held out the prospect of lower UK energy costs via participation in the EU’s internal electricity market.
Keir Starmer is anxious above all that no one sees any of this as a prelude to rejoining the EU customs union or single market. “Clear red lines” rule that out, he says, fearful of Reform-curious voters in Red Wall constituencies who trusted him with Brexit at the last election. He is starting to resemble the waitress in Five Easy Pieces who can’t bring herself to let Jack Nicholson’s character order toast because “we don’t have side orders”.
Next year it will be 10 years since Britain’s EU referendum. In that time a clear majority in the UK has decided Brexit was a costly mistake. It’s by no means clear the EU 27 would welcome Britain back as long as Reform was a contender for power. Yet slowly the pragmatic centre of British politics is reassembling the ingredients of a sensible relationship with Europe. It may always be a salad of acronyms. If so, that is probably a good thing. The harder it is to turn into a slogan, the better.
Photograph by Andrea Ronchini/NurPhoto