May is missing EU’s shift on free movement

In this country, the camera is focused only on Britain and its concerns. The prime minister is expected to announce that the UK will leave the single market. Philip Hammond has warned that he is prepared to start a tax and trade war with Europe to protect the economy, even though that would erode the rights of workers in “left behind” communities that voted for Brexit in protest against the status quo.

As egotistical as any selfie-obsessed Hollywood starlet, ministers seem to assume that nobody else has a role to play in the negotiations. Yet, as the slump in the value of sterling shows, this may be an island but Britain cannot act alone. Although Downing Street insists Mrs May wants a “hard, clean” Brexit, what happens on the Continent may muddy the water and soften the edges. One senior businessman, who has been involved in many commercial deals, says: “They are living in a fool’s paradise. There’s still a belief that the Europeans will blink, that they need us more than we need them, and I don’t believe that for a second.”

The prime minister is striking a pose on immigration: as a former Remainer she feels the need to demonstrate her commitment to Brexit, and sometimes over-compensates. Had Boris Johnson, a Leave campaigner, become prime minister he would have adopted a far softer tone. In a recent blog, Dominic Cummings, the strategic genius behind the Brexit campaign, revealed that Mr Johnson would also in his first week have allocated the promised extra £350 million to the NHS, which might have changed the narrative on the winter crisis. The foreign secretary’s priority, had he got to No 10, would have been to reassure Remainers; Mrs May’s focus has been to prove her credentials to Conservative Eurosceptics. She is looking at Brexit through the blue-tinted lens of the Tory right and that is making her unresponsive to the rest of the EU.

Meanwhile, there is growing evidence that attitudes to the free movement of people may be shifting among senior European politicians. Last week Lodewijk Asscher, the Dutch Labour leader and deputy prime minister, called for a radical reform of the system, arguing that the rules had become a “business model for lowering wages”. Voters’ backing for the principle of free movement was “eroding”, he said, and the way in which it is implemented “has to change . . . if we want to preserve support for the European Union”.

A Dutch MEP, Hans van Baalen, has called for countries including the UK to be able to apply an “emergency brake” on immigration. With elections in the Netherlands just a few weeks away, Geert Wilders’ anti-immigrant Freedom Party is regularly topping the polls and mainstream politicians are adjusting their tone, with potential long-term consequences for the EU.

Against a backdrop of the migrant crisis, terrorist attacks and economic downturn, right-wing populists are winning support across Europe. Immigration is likely to dominate the forthcoming election campaigns. François Fillon, the conservative French presidential candidate who is tipped for a run-off against the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, recently pledged to introduce a migrant quota, which would be incompatible with free movement rules. “I want France to be able to decide the number of people it takes in every year,” he declared.

Angela Merkel, facing a challenge from the right-wing Alternative for Germany party, has called for the EU to “discuss further” limits on migrants’ access to welfare. In Italy, the Five Star Movement — whose founder, Beppe Grillo, once tweeted that Rome was in danger of being “swamped by rats, rubbish and illegal immigrants” — is in the ascendancy after the resignation of Matteo Renzi.

Although the bureaucrats at the European Commission insist that free movement is a founding principle of the EU, elected politicians have begun to ask whether this is being too widely applied. Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former prime minister of Denmark, admitted: “We have not . . . been firm enough in stating that it was [intended to be] the free movement of people applying for jobs and getting jobs.” Alexander Stubb, the former prime minister of Finland, also called for “a re-evaluation, perhaps a renegotiation, on free movement of labour”. Even Jyrki Katainen, vice-president of the EU Commission, conceded last month that there must be a “balanced solution which maximises the benefits and minimises the unwanted consequences” of free movement rules.

The cynics will say that this is meaningless guff, and they may be right — the EU is sclerotically slow to reform — but the political dynamic is changing in Europe. The Brexit vote, and Donald Trump’s victory, have sent shock waves through the ruling class all over the world and it’s a message that is likely to be reinforced by this year’s elections. Even if Marine Le Pen does not win power in France, she is likely to do well enough to give a further jolt to EU complacency about free movement rules. Europe could be forced to make concessions about immigration that render Brexit obsolete. You don’t have to be a Remoaner to think that would change many people’s calculations about the relative advantages of staying in or leaving the EU.

As a vicar’s daughter, Mrs May must know CS Lewis’s comparison of the Trinity to a fourth dimension — as incomprehensible to the human mind as a cube would be to those who could only perceive a square. Right now the prime minister has a two-dimensional view of the EU negotiations but she risks being skewered by her own inflexibility. She must start to think in three dimensions and look at all the moving parts if she wants to stop the Brexit movie turning into a dark and depressing film noir.