The ghosts of Brexit past return to wail about Erasmus

“Brexit was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that… Old Brexit was as dead as a door-nail.”

If that rewrite of the first lines of A Christmas Carol seems like wishful thinking, just listen to what panicked Brexiteers are saying about the UK’s decision to rejoin the EU’s Erasmus+ scheme. The ghosts of Brexit past have come out to wail and moan that their failed project is being killed off, and it’s not just their chains that sound rattled.

For shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel, giving up to 100,000 Britons per year the opportunity to learn or train in the EU amounts to a “betrayal… dragging Britain back under the control of Brussels”. Readers with long memories might recall that in January 2020, when Patel was home secretary and Boris Johson was prime minister, she nodded along happily as he told the Commons, “there is no threat to the Erasmus scheme”. The UK withdrew from the scheme less than a year later.

For Lord Frost, the UK is on a slippery slope and has negotiated a terrible deal with Brussels. Negotiating terrible deals with Brussels is one area in which he is an undisputed expert, but Frosty’s verdict seems ridiculous when the UK will get most of its £570m back to distribute around UK participants and also be able to qualify for a share of £1bn in EU grants.

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“They just want to be liked by the EU,” Frost said, accidentally hitting the nail on the head – rejoining Erasmus helps to repair some of the damage done by him and his boss Boris Johnson. It will smooth the way for a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) deal that will make food and drink cheaper, as well as a carbon trading linkage deal that will allow British businesses to dodge a new EU carbon border tax.

For Johnson, writing in the Daily Mail shortly before the announcement, a Labour plot to reverse Brexit is underway. With typical good taste, and apparently having forgotten the murder of MP Jo Cox seven days before the 2016 referendum, he wrote: “If they try seriously to reopen Brexit they will be walking into a hail of machine gun fire; and if that is the fight they really want, bring it on.”

The disgraced former PM, whose Turing scheme was a misfiring attempt to replace Erasmus that mostly benefited students with better-off parents, sounded like a worried man reliant on reverse psychology and the traditional Boris bluster. He wrote: “Are you really sure, my dear Labour friends, that it is such a winner to reopen Brexit? The public can see pretty clearly what has happened since 2016. The UK has suffered nothing like the national cataclysm that was prophesied when the people voted to leave.” The public can also clearly see that Brexit has wiped up to 8% off GDP, just one of the reasons that YouGov polling currently has Rejoin leading Stay Out by a margin of 50% to 30%.

Perhaps rejoining Erasmus is the first step towards giving Britain a Scrooge-like second chance with Europe. In this Brexit version of A Christmas Carol, it’s now pretty clear that Johnson, Frost and Patel are the Muppets.