Brexit Britain has closed to foreigners

Britain’s National Health Service has a pressing need for more doctors. Hospitals have found willing and qualified recruits overseas. Theresa May’s government refuses to issue them visas. Better patients be put at risk than immigration rules relaxed. Support for the NHS may be the closest thing Britain has to a state religion, but Brexit is nothing if not “taking back control” of the nation’s borders.

This small lunacy illuminates a bigger choice. There is more to Brexit than supply chains, regulations and farm subsidies. It is about the nation’s character. Membership of the EU has anchored a cosmopolitan Britain in the wider world. Does leaving portend Britain First — a place that has had its fill of footloose elites, global corporations and migrants? Or is it to be Britain Unbound — a country of swashbuckling free traders with their sights on the world? Brexiters have so far ducked the collision.

Mrs May has come down firmly on the side of a Trumpian interpretation of the 2016 referendum result. Debarring foreign doctors is just a start.

Though on the Remain side in the referendum campaign, the prime minister has long taken an illiberal view of migration. “Citizens of nowhere,” she has called the globalists. Her stance is entirely of a piece with the anti-migrant campaign waged by Brexiters.

Hostility to immigration has been at the core of the pro-Brexit case. Escaping the free movement obligations of the EU has been made the reddest of red lines.

The leave side defined itself with the claim that Britain was being lost to an uncontrollable tide of migrants from eastern and central Europe. Many were criminals and welfare scroungers. Public services had been overwhelmed.

Big business was in on the conspiracy. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, the cabinet ministers who led the Leave campaign and are now holding Mrs May to ransom in pursuit of the hardest of Brexits, charged that the CBI, the country’s leading business organisation, was in the pocket of Brussels. Free movement allowed fat corporations to cut wages and supplied well-heeled elites with household staff.

The restrictions are blind to social class. The Guards Polo Club, an elite institution founded by Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, has blamed a financial loss on immigration curbs on overseas players and grooms.

Friends say Mr Johnson and Mr Gove are not personally anti-migrant — just as Mr Johnson had not meant to offend when he once described Africans as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”. The leave campaign’s warnings that NHS maternity units would soon be overrun by Turkish mothers were, well, campaign politics.

Putting aside the breathtaking cynicism, such self-exculpation ignores the inconvenient fact that the government plans draconian cuts in the numbers allowed to come to Britain. Before the Brexit vote net migration was running at almost 300,000 a year. It has fallen since to about 250,000 as many EU citizens sense they are no longer welcome. The intention is to slash the number by another 60 per cent to 100,000 or less.

All this makes a mockery of “Global Britain”. The essence of the great expansion of cross-border trade and investment — and of Britain’s success as a global business hub — has been that borders have been opened to people as well as capital, goods and services. Every significant trade deal includes provision for freer movement of workers.

Perhaps Mr Gove and Mr Johnson do feel the odd twinge of regret about their nativist fear-mongering as Britain waves goodbye to the open, liberal society that flourished within the EU. But how to explain this to voters who took them at their word when they promised to throw up the barricades? Donald Trump is due to visit Britain this summer.

The America First president will feel quite at home with the Brexiters.