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May 20 2025 - 11:45am
Much of the commentary around Britain’s new “reset” deal with the EU is understandably focused on weighing the distribution of benefits and costs to the two parties involved. The youth mobility scheme, intended to allow young Europeans to work, study, travel and volunteer more easily across the continent, has been subjected to such analysis. While this could be attractive for some British youth, it is worth pondering what the UK might receive in return.
Some have been tempted to compare cross-national rates of youth unemployment, for example. It looks likely that some EU states will exploit Keir Starmer’s deal to externalize their youth unemployment problems, sending young people fleeing competition from cheaper immigrant labor in their own countries to become baristas and students in London. It is also true that this scheme will benefit British youth less than it will their continental counterparts, who will take advantage of the scheme to sharpen their English language skills in Britain’s less regulated labor market. Young Britons, in comparison, are unlikely to seek employment in similar numbers in Amsterdam or Warsaw. If anyone stands to gain, it will be the middle classes, not British youth working in retail, social care or construction.
Ultimately, though, this scheme only indirectly concerns young people. Rather, the best way to understand it is by considering the 2002 romcom L’Auberge Espanol — released as Pot Luck in English — about a flat share in Barcelona between Erasmus students from Spain, England, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Denmark. Plenty of youthful and lustful high jinks ensue, alongside the occasional sexual and cultural faux pas, among the beautiful cosmopolitan young people. The plot of this crude but financially successful Euro-agitprop is less important than the fact that those beautiful young people are now all middle-aged.
This is the key to understanding Starmer’s “youth mobility” scheme – it is not aimed at young people but rather at their parents and, especially, the centrist dads. “Youth mobility” is the symbol which represents the nostalgia with which middle-aged middle-class Britons view the European Union. The EU of the early 2000s, when inflation and interest rates were perennially low, City jobs plentiful, universities thriving, and Eastern Europe still shabby and cheap, only just reconnecting with the world after Soviet isolation.
Inner-city London, meanwhile, was still gentrifying at prices that were affordable for university lecturers and middle managers. Rome, Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam, Lisbon provided a cosmopolitan hinterland for the British middle classes of this era to escape those parts of Spain colonized by the British working classes, with the cheaper and more exotic Eastern European and Baltic cities reserved for seedier escapades. This is the vision of Britain that would peak nearly 10 years after the release of L’Auberge Espanol, with the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012.
We now have a national policy based around a fantasy flat share. This reflects the one iron law of British politics that survives Brexit and the collapse of all other political certainties: the more pro-EU you are, the less likely you are to actually pay attention to the countries across the Channel. If Centrist Dad could bear to stand the full 10 minutes in the visa queue with people from outside Europe, he would quickly see that the continent of the early 2000s is gone.
Youth mobility will cost the British Exchequer more than its continental equivalents. But it is a cost Labour is willing to pay to prevent Centrist Dad from defecting to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens in 2029. At bottom, however, the youth mobility scheme is without economic rationale or electoral strategy. Instead, it is a vibes-based policy, intended to recreate a cosmopolitan cocoon for aging middle-class millennials and Gen Xers, letting them imagine that the world is the same as it was in their youth.
Unfortunately for these Europhiles, the world has changed. And as any trip to Eastern Europe reveals, young people in those parts may well have better prospects at home than in Starmer’s ailing Britain.
Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently: The National Interest: Politics after Globalization.
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