UK Nationals in the EU: Rights

Debate between Carol Monaghan and Peter Grant

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Westminster Hall

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that walking away with no deal threatens Scotland’s world-leading higher education and research sector? Our researchers have to be able to move freely to the EU, and European researchers to our universities and research centres, so that we benefit mutually from the expertise.

[Peter Grant]

I absolutely agree, and it is not only Scotland’s exceptional universities that are under threat; every research-based university and institution in the United Kingdom is in danger of losing out because of short-sighted folly.

One thing the debate has demonstrated is the absolute folly of those, particularly on the Tory Benches, who still try to tell us that we could just walk away today without a deal and it would make no difference. What a betrayal that would be of the 4.5 million people who, right now, are worried about whether their basic human rights will be respected: the right to continue to live in the house they already live in, and the right for their children to keep going to the school they already go to and keep playing with the same friends. Those rights are not ours to give and take away; they are rights that people have because they are human beings. For Ministers even to use phrases like “bargaining chips” to deny that they are treating people as such, makes it clear that somewhere, deep down inside, that is part of the thinking.

Every time we have discussed in the Chamber the rights of EU nationals living in the United Kingdom, the chorus of protest from the Conservative Benches has always been, “We are very concerned about the rights of UK citizens and UK nationals living in the European Union.” Today, those Members have been given a full 90-minute debate in which to express those concerns, and where have they all gone? They can turn up in their hundreds in the middle of the night to vote for the process to start removing the rights of those UK nationals, but when it comes to speaking out for them it is another matter. I can understand that some of them had other things to do, but when 320 of them cannot stay for the full 90-minute debate, that tells us more about where their beliefs and values really lie than anything we might say.

It is now six months since the Brexit Secretary told us that reaching an agreement on the rights of nationals in each other’s countries would be

“the first thing on our agenda”.

He went on to say:

“I would hope that we would get some agreement in principle very, very soon, as soon as the negotiation process starts.”

We are now a third of the way through that negotiation process, and the Library, in analysing the joint technical note of 31 August 2017, has indicated that there are five areas on which agreement is close and 20 on which it is nowhere near. In other words, in one third of the available negotiating time the progress on our No. 1 priority is that 80% of it is nowhere close to being agreed. That is what happens when human beings are used as bargaining chips instead of saying, right at the beginning, “This is what we’re going to do because it’s the right thing to do.”

We should never forget that the position of the UK Government in relation to the two sets of citizens is very different: we can ask other people to respect the rights of UK nationals living overseas, but we can absolutely guarantee the rights of non-UK nationals living here. Once again, I repeat the call for the UK Government to do that, not because it might make the Europeans do something we want them to do but because morally it is the only acceptable course of action.

The debate should have concluded on 24 June. The reason it has not is that the Government’s obsession with being seen to get hard on immigration has got to the point where any price, but any price, is worth paying. The economic price of losing our membership of the single market will likely be counted in hundreds of thousands of jobs and losses of tens—possibly hundreds—of billions of pounds to our economy.