There are 131,000 EU citizens working in British arts

There are 131,000 EU citizens working in British arts

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norman lebrecht

November 01, 2018

They make up 7% of the workforce.

What will become of them after Brexit? Soft, or hard?

Read here.

caricature (c) The Economist

Comments

  • buxtehude says:

    “EU citizens already here are guaranteed the ability to stay indefinitely, following a registration process which costs £65.” — I’m not sure this is true; unless governed by the preceding “If”: “Should the UK leave the EU with no deal and extend its current immigration system to Europeans…” This is far from certain.

    From a recent column by Raphael Behr on recent apologies, of sorts, by George Osborne on the defects of his 2016 Remain campaign:

    “There was no political tradition of attaching value, whether cultural or economic, to the idea of free movement. It was seen only as a cost inflicted on ‘indigenous workers’ from the outside, never as a reciprocal benefit. Still today many pro-Europeans are afraid to make the case. Few challenge the idea that ending free movement is an enhancement of national privilege when, in legal and practical terms, it is a curtailment of our rights. It limits the freedoms and opportunities attached to possession of a UK passport as assuredly as it incinerates the security of those other EU citizens who settled in the UK, imagining that their entitlement to call this country home was guaranteed by treaty.

    “Only 650 of those who will be required to to apply for a new “settled status” have completed the process as part of a pilot scheme. Most of the 3.5 million population of British residents from other EU countries – teachers, nurses, carers, waiters, plumbers, musicians, parents, friends, husbands, wives – must just watch the clock tick down to Brexit day and hope for a happy resolution to their predicament. Their future is underwritten by Brexiteer promises and the reputation of the Home Office. It is hard to imagine two less valuable currencies.

    “And the bitterest part, the one that Osborne touched on, but still couldn’t quite grasp, is that British politics doesn’t even have a way to articulate what has happened to these people; that they did not arrive as aliens but as citizens; that the “Europe” they were free to move in was the same one we were free to move in; that they were us and that the indignity we inflict on them is something we are ultimately also doing to ourselves.”

    • Mark London says:

      More nonsense ! The Uk Gov already guaranteed the rights of remain to Eu citizens even BEFORE the rights of UK citizens to remain in EU countries was given ! And there’s the Rub! The EU negotiators treating UK with disdain and daring to have the arrogance to leave its mafia club ! Well tough. We want to leave their sinking ship!

  • Rustier spoon says:

    Who knows what will happen…maybe British people will get their jobs! YES!!!! The “EU Citizens” are not necessarily in these UK jobs because they are any better than the British people whose jobs they rightly are, first and foremost…in my humble opinion anyway.

  • C Porumbescu says:

    Any figures for the number of non-EU citizens working in the arts in the UK (presumably without undue difficulty)? Because the answer to the question above is surely exactly the same (or far more likely, considerably easier) than for them.

  • James says:

    EU citizens surely account for more than 7% of the arts workforce. I’m an EU citizen. I’m British.

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