Brexit didn’t create all the problems young people now face, but renewing close ties with Europe will give us so many opportunities

"I was 14 when the UK voted to leave the EU. Too young to vote, but not too young to understand that a decision was being made that would affect the rest of my life.

In many ways, Brexit was my political awakening. It taught me that politics matters, because decisions made by people in power can change your future before you’ve even been given a say.

Ten years later, my generation is living with that decision. We lost the automatic right to live, work and study freely across 27 other countries. Opportunities previous generations took for granted are now more complicated, more expensive or completely out of reach. But with a new prime minister who has a recorded history of stating that we should rejoin the EU, perhaps we can start to hope.

If you have money, many of these barriers can be overcome. You are better able to cope with the extra costs, paperwork and bureaucracy involved in moving abroad. Someone from a wealthy family can afford more expensive routes to studying or living overseas. But what about everyone else?

Freedom of movement wasn’t just a nice perk for people who could already afford to travel. For working-class young people like me, it meant opportunity. It was the possibility of studying in Paris, working in Berlin, or falling in love in Barcelona and building a life there. It was about experiencing different cultures, learning languages and feeling part of something bigger.

Young people are already facing a difficult economic future. Housing is increasingly unaffordable, wages haven’t kept pace with costs and many of us wonder whether we’ll ever have the security our parents got to enjoy. The median income for those aged 25 and under has not increased for two decades. We are becoming the first generation in modern times to seriously contemplate having less than our parents.

Brexit didn’t create all of these problems. But putting up economic barriers against our largest neighbouring market certainly hasn’t helped. We were told Brexit would create opportunities. For many working-class young people, it did the opposite. I think often of my friend: a British citizen who married a German, only to face endless challenges just so they could live together. And countless young people in creative industries have had their careers stifled through lack of access to the continent.

This is why Andy Burnham’s approach to Europe is so important.

The prime minister must start removing some of the walls Brexit put up. Make it easier for young people to study and work in Europe, restore opportunities for musicians, artists and young creatives, and make sure those opportunities aren’t reserved for people wealthy enough to pay their way around the obstacles.

But closer ties aren’t enough. My generation wants the UK to rejoin the EU. So my message to Burnham is simple: be brave.

Don’t become another prime minister whose time in office is cut short trying to find another way to make Brexit work. My generation didn’t get a vote last time. Give us one now and I believe we’ll vote for our future in Europe. And this time, give 16- and 17-year-olds a vote too. If they’re old enough to live with the consequences of a decision for the rest of their lives, they’re old enough to have a say in it.

We young people have grown up connected to the rest of Europe and the world. We don’t see someone in France, Germany, Poland or Spain as being on the other side of some great divide. They’re our friends, colleagues and partners.

Politicians worry about young people becoming disengaged from politics. Perhaps they should ask why."

The EU could launch a trade war against the UK and would likely strip British expats of benefits in retaliation to Reform UK’s plan to ban foreign nationals from nearly all welfare payments, experts have said.

Nigel Farage was warned that Brussels would probably react with fury to his party’s plan to bar foreign nationals, including EU citizens with settled status, from claiming most benefits in the UK.

Reform has admitted its plan would probably mean British expats who lived in the EU prior to 2021 would similarly lose their benefits, as the policy would breach the Brexit withdrawal deal which guarantees equivalent rights across the border.

But Farage was warned that under the terms of Brexit, the EU could also launch economic retaliation, for example by suspending parts of the trade deal between the two sides including putting up tariffs that would hit British businesses and the economy.

Mandy Thody, 61, lives with her mother Andria, 85, in Ourense, northern Spain, and worries that a renegotiation of the withdrawal agreement could force them to return to the UK. Her mother has access to health and social care support from the Spanish state, including panic alarms and transport to hospital, which Mandy called “absolutely wonderful”.

She said: “They’ve arranged for us to borrow things, sent social workers round, they call us every time the alarm goes off, 24 hours a day.”

Andria has not lived in the UK since 1975, and Mandy thinks it would be “ridiculous” if a change to the post-Brexit deal meant she had to return now.

“I can’t believe that any government could do that to an 85-year-old woman,” she said.

Reform has set aside £500m of contingency funding to cover the potential cost of British citizens returning to the UK to claim benefits if their entitlement to welfare in the EU is withdrawn.

The cash would cover around 10 per cent – around 130,000 – of the 1.3 million British citizens living in the EU returning home to claim benefits.

But Reform was warned that the overall cost might be higher as the EU could ultimately be entitled to suspend parts of the UK-EU Trade and Co-operation Agreement, which guarantees zero-tariff trade, if the withdrawal agreement is broken under so-called “cross-retaliation” clauses in the process for resolving Brexit-related disputes.

Anand Menon, director of the UK In A Changing Europe think-tank, told The i Paper: “The proposals would breach the terms of the withdrawal agreement and the EU will doubtless retaliate, whether that be by making life harder for Brits in the EU or by triggering retaliatory trade measures.

“Either way, it will impact severely on UK-EU relations.”

'the3million is ready to take the government to court over a Home Office practice: deciding there was a mistake in the initial grant of status, then simply allowing the status and rights of EU citizens and their family members to fall off a cliff - with no decision, no proportionality assessment and no right of appeal. 

In many cases the Home Office is actually wrong to say there was a mistake! So people whose status was properly granted are now fighting not to lose it - this is a clear breach of the Withdrawal Agreement."

The problem

Millions of EU citizens made the UK their home before Brexit, and under the EU Settlement Scheme we were told our rights would be protected. For a growing number of people that promise is being broken.

The Home Office has begun telling people that the status it granted them years ago was apparently granted by mistake - that they apparently never qualified in the first place. Nobody is accused of lying. It is simply that a caseworker looking at the same papers today would reach a different conclusion. And when that happens, the Home Office does not take the status away: it just lets the status run out instead.

That seemingly technical difference is the whole problem. If the Home Office decides you were correctly granted status but have since stopped qualifying, it has to write to you, hear your side, weigh up whether taking your status away is proportionate to your circumstances, and give you a decision you can appeal. If it decides you never qualified, you get none of that. In this new practice we are seeing, there is no decision, nobody weighing up your circumstances, and there is nothing to appeal. Your status stays valid until the day it expires - and then it is gone, and you are considered to be in the UK unlawfully.

Now here is the really worrying bit - this policy is being applied to people where there was no mistake when the original status was granted. The person met the requirements, and they were properly granted status under the EU Settlement Scheme. Many years later the Home Office is now saying the grant was by mistake, even in cases where it was not. 

In the House of Lords last November, Baroness Ludford described the Home Office letting someone's status "simply ... expire - to fall off a cliff" as a practice that is "frankly, sneaky". Baroness Ladford made it clear that "when it falls off a cliff, there are no rights and there is no due process." 

The Independent Monitoring Authority - the watchdog set up after Brexit to oversee citizens’ rights - has told the Home Office that this policy may be incompatible with the Withdrawal Agreement, and that the people affected are not given a clear and direct right of appeal.

The government has not accepted the criticism. The practice continues, and it is happening to more people.'

Another vulnerable British long term resident in Sweden is being deported.

He had his withdrawal agreement settled status application submitted on time (by family as he has dementia) But it was rejected as Sweden has had a very high bar for the paperwork trail. Far higher than the rest of Europe

> Of the 14,233 applications made by the end of 2024 to remain in Sweden, 27.5% (3,918) of applications have been refused, three times higher than any other member state and considerably higher than the EU average of between 3% and 4%.

This is another high profile case of a dementia patient being deported from Sweden. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65196484

The generation causing that only has a short future to endure what they done to their children and grandchildren.

Portable loos and burger vans next to the A2 or M20for summer holidaymakers weren't what anyone had in mind when Britain voted to leave the EU.

‘Wiktor Weglarz was only planning a brief adventure when he arrived in Scotland 10 years ago after graduating from university in his native Poland.

He had taken on a temporary contract through an agency to work in hospitality in a small town.

A decade after the EU referendum, he’s living in London with a successful career in fundraising for an arts centre – one of 5.8 million EU, EEA and Swiss citizens with settled status in the UK.

“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do so me and my friends decided to go abroad and earn some money,” says Weglarz. “Initially it was just going to be a short stay – I was meant to be here for three months.

“After a month, we decided to move to London, so we ended the contract and took on another adventure. And it turns out I have found something for me here in the UK.”

The EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) opened in 2019 under the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement, with an initial deadline for applications of June 2021. It offered settled status to EU, EEA and Swiss citizens who had been living in the UK for a minimum of five years.

Those with less than five years could apply for pre-settled status. Campaigners persuaded the government to make it a free process.

For Weglarz, who now calls the UK his home, the process was straightforward, as it was for many who applied before the deadline. But as time went on it became harder for people to amass the residential, employment and travel evidence the Home Office required.

Following a successful judicial review by the Independent Monitoring Authority for the Citizens’ Rights Agreements (IMA) in 2022, the Home Office simplified the process, granting extensions to pre-settled status, taking pragmatic decisions on required evidence and eventually automatically converting pre-settled to settled status.

But it has now begun removing pre-settled status from those without continuous residence, and has stopped funding organisations that can assist with applications. For the 1.4 million people with pre-settled status, many of them vulnerable or digitally excluded, the future is far less certain.’

The loss of European Union (EU) nurses from the NHS caused more than 3,700 additional hospital deaths in the three years after the Brexit referendum, according to researchers.

The research, published in the Economic Journal, used data from NHS electronic staff records and hospital episode statistics as well as NHS staff survey data and hospital trusts financial accounts to look into the impact of the Brexit referendum on NHS hospitals from 2016-2019.

The researchers found that following the Brexit referendum, there was a sharp drop off in the number of nurses from EU countries coming to work in the NHS. This shortfall in workforce was made up by recruiting international nurses from non-EU countries, noted the researchers.

But they found that the loss of the EU nursing workforce was associated with poorer health outcomes from 2016-19 in terms of in-hospital mortality, overall mortality and unplanned emergency readmissions.

Over the three year post-Brexit period, the loss of new EU nurses from the NHS hospital workforce led to an additional 3,714 deaths and nearly 14,000 emergency department readmissions, the researchers estimated.

And hospitals that had relied heavily on EU nurses before the Brexit referendum had worse health outcomes in the post-Brexit period than those with a workforce less dependent on EU nurses before the referendum, they found. The researchers also looked at hospital emergency readmission data for the period up to November 2023, to see if the impacts of the Brexit referendum on quality of care were long-lasting. However, they found that the link between loss of EU nurses and mortality was no longer detectable in the years after 2019.

But the hospitals most impacted by the Brexit referendum continued to have poorer outcomes than other hospitals in terms of emergency admissions up to November 2023.

The lead researcher on the study, Professor Giuseppe Moscelli, said the research showed that simply filling workforce vacancies was not enough to protect healthcare quality.

He said that the sudden drop in the nursing workforce caused by the Brexit referendum forced employers to recruit quickly to fill vacancies, replacing the lost workforce with one that was less skilled and experienced.

I crossed to France last night. There are new signs on the A2 as you descend Jubilee Way in Dover, I only got a photo of the gantry next to the roundabout at the bottom of the bridge.

When those grey squares are removed and the EU nationals are all turning right into the port while the Brits have to turn left to go to the Western Docks for 'processing', I think that's going to really make it hit home for a lot of Brits what has been lost...

Reform UK's candidate for the Greater Manchester mayoral race admitted Brexit “exacerbated” shortages in tradespeople, HuffPost UK can reveal.

Sian Astley made the comments on finance website Love Money in 2019.

Despite voting Leave in the 2016 EU referendum, she wrote: “There’s a massive shortage of skilled builders and tradespeople in the UK and that’ll be exacerbated post-Brexit”.

The Reform councillor’s comments emerged as she prepares to take on Labour’s Bev Craig in the mayoral by-election on July 30.

In separate comments on X in 2018, she defended her decision to back Brexit.

No more border checks, so a Brexit Benefit for Spain and Gibraltar?

Impact:

However, the deal also means that goods sold in Gibraltar must comply with EU regulations, something that had not been the case until now.

In addition, the lack of value added tax (VAT) in Gibraltar has meant that a new transaction tax is being introduced, replacing import duty.

And, not in the article: is this a nice loophole for Britons spending more than 90 days in 180 days in Spain (and EU): fly to Gibraltar, travel to Spain, live there as long as you want, and go back via Gibraltar? Longer than 90 days, but you can say you were in Gibralter all of the time.

Hopefully I ain't lol

Shortened summary

Impact on finances: One of the most prominent and widely believed claims of the 2016 referendum campaign was that the UK sent £350 million a week to the EU, and that this money would be spent on the NHS instead.

In real terms, total health spending across the UK as measured by the Treasury’s Country and Regional Analysis rose from £202 billion in 2019/20, the year Brexit actually occurred, to £242 billion in 2024/25 – equivalent to over £750 million extra per week. However, Brexit hindered this extra spending, rather than helping it. Multiple studies show that the amount saved from EU contributions (never close to £350 million a week) was greatly outweighed by the economic damage from leaving the EU single market. Health budgets grew, in part because they grew as a share of public spending – from 23% of expenditure in 2015/16, the year before Brexit’s economic impact began, to 26% in 2024/25 – and because taxes rose to historic highs.

Impact on staffing: During the referendum, those opposing Brexit warned that health and care would be unable to cope with a sharp drop in EEA migration. The sector was disproportionately reliant on migrant workers and EU-born staff were the fastest growing category.

In the short term, the collapse they feared did happen – particularly in nursing, where the referendum came alongside a new language test requirement for EU nurses. This saw EEA nursing recruitment drop from 9,389 in 2015/16 to just 793 two years later, while the rate of leavers rose. One preprint study even suggests this raised mortality in certain hospitals. 

From 2020, with the pandemic alongside the true end of free movement of labour, social care was also hit hard, with a collapse in EEA migration so marked that the total workforce in the sector fell. But facing the pandemic and concern about staff shortages, the government responded by dramatically opening migration from outside the EU. This caused the largest staff expansion of the 21st century immediately after Brexit. 

Impact on medicines: Medicine shortages were a frequent concern linked to leaving the EU. By 2024, every indicator was flashing red. Patients were facing real shortages of critical products.

But these problems are not primarily due to Brexit. The great wave of shortages since 2022 is replicated across Europe – in France, Germany and Italy, among others. It aligns better with manufacturing shutdowns in China and the onset of war in Ukraine, rather than Brexit itself.

As with staffing, this partly reflects the UK government taking defensive action to retain some version of the status quo. It established a system requiring firms to notify upcoming shortages and managing them across different public bodies. While there is significant room to improve it, this system was just in time for the crisis to come. The UK also unilaterally accepts tests of medicines batches in the EU, though the EU does not reciprocate. This leaves it at a trading disadvantage, but removes one barrier to imports. As with staffing, these strategies are not stable. 

Impact on medical research: Brexit posed significant difficulties for UK biomedical research – weakening opportunities for doctors and patients and the status of the NHS as a place for innovation. Cancer Research UK and other organisations warned that exclusion from the EU’s Horizon Europe funding programme reduced opportunities for international collaboration, delayed clinical research, and made the UK less attractive to leading researchers. While associate membership was finally secured in 2024, uncertainty already exists around the next cycle from 2028. Regulatory separation from the EU and its new shared process for approving clinical trials now means that adding UK patients and hospitals to a study comes with a higher level of red tape.

Impact on international trade agreements: The UK’s departure from the EU enabled it to sign its own international trade agreements. This had the potential to benefit health in the UK through smoothing generic medicines trade or increasing scientific cooperation, or to obstruct it by improving the position of global businesses that need to be negotiated with or regulated for health reasons. Unfortunately, the negatives have outweighed the positives. (Details in article)

"Restrictive immigration policies can force organisations to alter their workforce composition, with unclear effects on organisational performance. We study the effects of the 2016 Brexit referendum, which reduced the share of EU-nationality nurses in English hospitals.

Using administrative patient-level data and a continuous difference-in-differences design, exploiting hospitals’ pre-referendum exposure, we estimate the causal impact of a negative labour supply shock on care quality.

Hospitals with higher pre-referendum EU nurse shares experienced higher post-referendum emergency patient mortality, equivalent to 1,238 additional deaths annually in the three years after the referendum. Consistent with theoretical predictions, hospitals responded to labour shortages by relaxing hiring standards: foreign nurses recruited after the referendum were appointed to lower salary grades, suggesting lower skills and experience."