Labour have made an announcement re their Brexit plan today, two of the key points are:
Guarantee the legal status of the three million EU nationals living in the UK on its first day in office
Perfectly reasonable, I have no issue with that but they then state:
Press for a reciprocal guarantee for the 1.2 million Britons living on the continen
What??? Point A absolutely must be conditional on point B, to guarantee maintaining full rights to EU citizens currently in the UK without necessarily having a reciprocal arrangement for UK citizens in the EU is insane.
Clearly, on any decent ethical grounds, it's vitally important that EU citizens in
both the UK and the rest of the EU who are resident outside their home country do not suddenly have their rights to live in their homes taken away.
But the trouble with saying that you won't guarantee rights to EU citizens in the UK unless the EU meets conditions first is that it amounts to using people's lives as political bargaining chips. It's not the fault of the EU citizens in the UK that we are Brexiting - they after all were quite deliberately denied a vote on the matter (incidentally itself making a mockery of the idea that the referendum vote was truly democratic.) Theresa May's current attitude basically amounts to saying,
we'll wreck these innocent people's lives unless we get what we want. It is utterly unethical, and is most definitely not the attitude of a Government that cares about the people it is supposed to be governing (And for what it's worth, it wouldn't be the first time that Theresa May has shown herself willing to destroy innocent people's lives for the sake of her political career - something that I think anyone considering voting Tory in June really ought to think about).
As far as protecting the lives of UK citizens in the EU - yes, we need to absolutely prioritise that, but it looks perfectly clear to me that main EU Governments involved have no desire to expel UK citizens. And besides, despite Brexit politicians tendency to paint the EU in the worst light they can, the EU and its Governments do on the whole care a reasonable about publicity. It's really not plausible that, if EU citizens in the UK are guaranteed residency rights, the EU will then suddenly turn around and deny those same rights to UK citizens in the EU. It's therefore not plausible that guaranteeing rights to EU citizens now is going to significantly damage the interests of UK citizens abroad. Rather, it's likely to get negotiations off to a better, more trusting, start on at least this issue.
One other point. There's a common assumption here that the situation is symmetrical between EU and UK citizens. That's not really the case because, by European standards, the UK has an exceptionally tough immigration system, much more so than many EU countries (certainly the ones in Western Europe where the vast majority of UK citizens abroad live, I'm not so sure about some of the Eastern European countries). We've already seen that in the numerous reports of EU citizens applying for formal UK residency having a much more complex system to apply, and often getting refused because of arcane technicalities in immigration regulations, in a way that doesn't seem to be happening to any great extent elsewhere in Europe. To that extent there is actually some case for arguing that the situation of EU citizens in the UK is more serious than that of UK citizens in Europe.
It may also be worth bearing in mind that Francois Hollande is already on record as having made a unilateral commitment to guarantee the rights of UK citizens in France - so we wouldn't really be the first country moving in that direction, although given Hollande won't be president much longer, it's not clear how much that promise is really worth.