The road is long...

For those of you unlucky enough to find yourselves on my friends list, you will undoubtedly have seen my regular 'conversations' with people in some politically focused groups on Facebook.

I'm sure I don't need to clarify where I stand on the political spectrum when it comes to Brexit - I do live in Brussels after all. Terrible incidents such as Manchester do prompt the need to consider whether we will be better or worse protected once we leave the E.U. Whether we can continue to be a member of organisations such as Europol is a serious question. According to its website, Europol's manadate is to "ensure that the interests of law enforcement agencies in the E.U. Member States are represented" and that it is accountable at the EU level to the Council of Ministers for Justice and Home Affairs, so by definition it would suggest that the UK staying part of Europol, at least as a full member, is not possible.

A common response to this point from those on the other side of the fence is that, by leaving the E.U. we are "taking back control of our borders", which will allow us to stop migrants coming in to the UK who have not been fully security checked. Now, this is true, but only if those migrants aren't already EU migrants from other E.U Member States. Asylum seekers are not eligible for Schengen visas, which means that they can be turned back around and sent back to the E.U country in which they first arrived.

So, the route to the UK is not as easy as some would have others believe, even before Brexit. Directive 2004/38/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29th April 2004 also already provides the ability for an EU Member State, such as the UK, to expel or refuse entry to an EU citizen attempting to enter its borders on the grounds of public policy, public security or public health. This right also extends to cover 'marriages of convenience', whereby if an EU citizen is found to have married a non-EU citizen just to give them EU citizenship, the latter can be expelled and their EU citizenship revoked.

Freedom of movement is of course different to the Schengen travel area, most noticeably for Brits as we (currently) have the ability to travel throughout the E.U. even though the UK is not part of Schengen, which is why you have to show your passport when returning to the UK or when entering another E.U. country. In order to gain full freedom of movement, a person needs to fall into the categories which are outlined by Directive 2004/38/EC:

 1) a born citizen of an EU Member State

2) Married to an EU citizen and hold full citizenship of an EU country, which takes a minimum of 2 years

3) Achieved citizenship in their own right, after being security checked, of an EU Member State which requires a minimum of 5 years of residency and having been employed

So the question should be asked to the UK government of why they do not utilise this legislation more often if there is an apparent influx of unwanted or undesirable EU nationals entering the UK. The most recent figures from the Home Office show that in 2015, there were 2,165 EU citizens who were held under immigration powers in the UK out of the 3 million resident in the country, which is 0.07% of the resident EU population. At the same time, over 159 million trips were made by EU nationals to the UK which resulted in 3,699 EU citizens being denied entry, or 0.002%. These are both statistically insignificant figures. So why aren't more EU nationals being deported or denied entry when the UK has the power to do so if there is a problem? For the sake of comparison, at the same time there were 85,975 Brits in British jails in the UK, which is 0.14% of the population and more than double that of the EU citizens detained when you compare the percentages.

As a further comparison, France denied entry to 6,411 EU citizens in 2015 which is more than twice the number denied by the UK despite France having less EU visitors than us. Is the truth that blaming the EU is good for British Governments when they get into trouble, and that EU visitors to the UK for both pleasure and for work are good for our economy as a whole? Successive British Governments for the past 15 to 20 years have used the 'faceless, unelected bureaucrats' in Brussels as a scape goat for their own failed policies.

To bring this rambling back to the start, what use is "taking back control of our borders" if we lose access to the other 27 EU Member States' criminal databases that our border guards currently have access to when scanning a passport or ID when a traveller arrives at UK passport control? The reality is that we will likely have less information about people than we do now... as the great Winston Churchill once said, "success consists of going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm".