I have a vivid memory of filling in a European Values survey as a young teenager in 1995. I was asked to rank what part of where you lived you identified with the most: with your city, your country, or with Europe. The ‘world’ wasn’t an option. So, I wrote Europe.
My life to date has been inextricably linked to the benefits afforded by the freedom of movement. Before starting my degree at the LSE I spent a year in Prague working alongside British and other expats. This was the first time I realised that, just like all the Europeans living in the UK, thousands of Brits love living in Europe.
I feel culturally and economically European. I am Welsh, born and bred, which must to an extent define me but after that, my default is European. Having grown up with the Cold War as the norm, European political union was a welcome relief.
The debate around the EU referendum is dominated by trade deals and free movement, areas predominantly about and lead by men. But the question of the UK’s membership of the EU has a potential impact on women’s lives well beyond trade and migration.
Do you know what the minimum wage is in the UK? Can you decipher a pay slip? Last month, New Europeans organised a free employment workshop together with the East European Advice Centre, helping newly arrived Poles to better understand their employment rights in the UK.
As a UK Referendum on EU membership gets closer, much is being made by those urging exit of the idea of national sovereignty. Indeed for some Brexiters this is the defining issue. What they mean by sovereignty seems to be that a country can make its own laws and act independently of all other countries. Whether such a situation ever obtained is highly questionable; but it certainly hasn’t obtained for the UK or any other country in recent times.
The European Commission’s unprecedented decision to initiate an investigation in Poland under the EU’s ‘rule of law’ mechanism has put Poland’s right-wing government on the defensive. But the Commission’s intervention could prove a double-edged sword.
27/02/2016 - 16:30
The TUC published a report last week highlighting the threat to workers’ rights in the UK if there is a vote to leave the EU in the June referendum.
With the Irish general elections approaching later this week we are presented with another opportunity to reflect on the inconsistent domestic policies towards voting rights across the EU. Despite being a nation famed for producing emigrants, the one in six of Irish-born adults living abroad are denied the vote.
Reform of the education system has recently been a highly contested issue topic in Hungary.
