Sadiq Khan’s call for a youth mobility agreement with EU countries is a welcome return to pro-European good sense and, I hope, a foretaste of what’s to come under a Labour government (“Sadiq Khan: ‘Free young people from Brexit work and travel ban’”).
As someone who has lived in three EU countries over the last 10 years, one of the saddest aspects of Brexit was knowing that future generations would not be able to do what I had done – or would find it much harder and more complicated. While my burgundy passport opened doors and ushered in opportunities, their blue passports bring them only red tape, uncertainty and long hours spent in draughty waiting rooms, waiting for appointments with immigration officials.
If we can’t have a return to EU membership just yet, at least we can restore some of the EU’s freedoms to the UK’s young people. It is through living and working in Europe, and through meeting fellow Europeans, that they will see the foolishness of Brexit and glimpse the opportunities that have been pointlessly denied them. It will be for their generation to learn the mistakes of the recent past and bring us back to the heart of Europe.
Ross McQueen
Brussels, Belgium
As a self-funded pre-doctoral researcher from the EU currently studying, working and surviving in London, Sadiq Khan’s statement on “freeing young people from Brexit” brings me hope, but also infuriates me profoundly. In September 2022, I relocated from the EU to London to pursue a PhD in English with no funding but fervour and enthusiasm. My life savings went to pay the exorbitant visa fees, health surcharge and tuition fees. As an international student, my applications for funding got rejected several times – the priority is always given to home students, relegating international applicants to secondary consideration.
The working restrictions imposed on international students with a visa are insane (20 hours a week, only fixed-term contracts, no benefits). Despite having an international career in research and teaching, when I moved to London, I found myself trapped in those sectors that according to Khan have been historically filled by “EU nationals”: hospitality, hourly paid roles in education. Those jobs don’t pay bills and are extremely precarious – that’s why local people don’t want them.
Ironically, my PhD project explores alternative narratives to migration crises in journalism, and now I am fortunate enough to say that I am experiencing first hand the realities of my own research, so I don’t need to do any fieldwork.
If the UK seeks favourable agreements with the EU for its youth, it must extend the same opportunities to EU nationals in return. This means reducing the tuition fees at university and opening the doors to jobs that a Briton would take on. Would you, British people, willingly move to the EU to work for lower and precarious wages with no benefits and in undesirable positions?
Irene Praga Guerro
London WC1
Bigging up Bradford
As a local resident, I was looking forward to reading the recommendations from Minal Patel, chef-patron at Prashad, Bradford (“Where chefs go to grab a bite”, Observer Food Monthly). However, all four of the recommendations from Patel turned out to be in Leeds. As a regular diner at Karachi Restaurant on Neal Street in Bradford, I can reassure your readers that the capital of culture in 2025 does have lots of its own excellent cafes and restaurants. Please visit and discover them.
John Perry
Silsden, Bradford
Measles: a warning
It was pneumococcal meningitis that left our baby profoundly deaf in 1980, but the excellent specialist unit he attended from the age of three to 16 was there because of a rubella epidemic in the 1970s (“The Observer view on the measles outbreak: it shows why the NHS needs proper funding”). This resulted in more deaf babies being born, and the need for appropriate education in the London borough of Bromley became a priority. The provision, within a mainstream school, has gone from strength to strength and long may it continue.
With the recent concern over low uptake of the vaccination, I worry and wonder if history will repeat itself and deaf or disabled babies be born to the next generation of unvaccinated women who contract the deceptively mild but potentially damaging (to the foetus) virus during pregnancy. In all the current coverage, dialogue and discussion on measles, I have neither heard nor read a mention of this other possibly alarming aspect of the MMR situation.
Jenny Froude
Beckenham, Kent
What now for Woodhouse?
I read with great concern the news that the UK would lose its last blast furnace at Port Talbot. One connected aspect of this that does not seem to have been discussed is the proposed opening of a new coal mine, Woodhouse colliery in Cumbria, for coking coal. If there are no blast furnaces in the UK, is the business case for Woodhouse still valid?
Matt Hicks
Sheffield
Super-rich, super-toxic
Tim Adams’s piece on Dutch philosophy professor Ingrid Robeyns was a breath of fresh air (“‘No one should have more than €10m’: the author of Limitarianism on why the super-rich need to level down radically”). The only way to accumulate a lot of money is to take lots of smaller bits of money off a lot of other people.
It’s not “wealth creation” at all, because the real wealth comes from combining the resources of the Earth and leveraging them cleverly together with the different living standards of working people around the globe. Anything else is really just an exercise in shuffling money around and siphoning off a bit as you do it. And that’s the point of currency. It needs to flow. The clue’s in the name. Like water, if it amalgamates into a vast, stagnant pool it can easily become toxic. Similar effects can often be observed in the behaviours of the mega-rich and, as Robeyns says, are “setting the world on fire”.
Jeremy Brettingham
North Creake, Norfolk
Sole music
Rachel Cooke writes of her love of Jane Grigson’s book English Food (“Can’t face yet another menu offering charred hispi? This 50-year-old cookbook will help”). May I put in a word for Grigson’s Fish Cookery. A random sample from “The Sole”: “It must be confessed that the life history of the sole is not entertaining, delicious though it may taste. Mostly it lies supine on the bed of the sea, dark side up, attracting as little attention as possible. Its name means ‘flat’, like the sole of the foot. The most dramatic episode of its life – to the outside observer – is when the left eye of the perfectly normal fish-shaped lava moves up and over the head to the right side as the sole flattens into its characteristic shape.”
Robert Tilleard
Tisbury, Salisbury, Wiltshire
