Daryl McCann in Winter 2019-20 Salisbury Review

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Here is one of my two pieces in the latest Salisbury Review from the UK:

The UK is, as Prime Minister Johnson insists, much more than a middle-ranking power. It has all kinds of advantages, including being a key element of the Anglosphere. CANZUK is the clumsy acronym for Canada, Australia and New Zealand and the United Kingdom, four countries that are separated by great geographical distances but not civilisational ones. Johnson, speaking about the challenges and opportunities afforded the UK at this remarkable moment in its history, has written: “Now is the time – as we leave the EU – to turbo-charge those advantages.” One way of deepening the ties between these four countries with a similar heritage, along with upgrading trade, defence and education arrangements, would be bold new common travel areas throughout the Anglosphere.

A post-Brexit UK will not have to look far to find a perfectly good model. It is the Australian-New Zealand Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement (TTA) which has been successfully operating for years. Today more than 650,000 New Zealand citizens, out of a population of only 5 million, live and work in Australia, and there is only ever light-hearted talk here about a “Kiwi invasion”. Although every New Zealander, by possession of a New Zealand passport, is free to live and work in Australia at any time of their choosing, subject to criminal and health checks, the TTA does not provide a fast track to Australian citizenship. Quite the opposite, in fact. My Dunedin daughter-in-law met her husband while working in Melbourne on a TTA visa. Though she has always paid Australian taxes, married an Australian, given birth to an Australian daughter, provided her own private health insurance and adopted Australia as her homeland, she cannot obtain Australian citizenship unless she returns to New Zealand and applies to immigrate here at a later date, with stipulations very different and not-so welcoming than those attached to the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement.

There are, to be frank, young Kiwis who complain about the unfairness of the TTA. They might be here for years, contributing to Australian society and yet not enjoying the full range of social services provided to Australians. They will point out that New Zealand is much more flexible and generous to Australians abiding in their home country and grumble about being second-class citizens. This is to totally misunderstand the opportunity that the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement offers them. To put it bluntly, Kiwis are not second-class Australian citizens but first-class New Zealand ones, and because they were fortunate enough to be born in the Land of the Long White Cloud, they are free to work in New Zealand and Australia as desire or ambition takes them, an opportunity that others in the world can only dream about.

The TTA only exists because Australia and New Zealand are successful and sovereign nations and the vast majority of their respective populations want to retain their original citizenship for life. If that were not true and if virtually everybody in New Zealand suddenly wanted to relocate to Australia (or vice versa), the TTA would be axed in a heartbeat. The best way for a common travel area to be viable, then, is that the countries concerned enjoy living standards and a worldview that are comparable and compatible. Otherwise, the common travel area is likely to devolve into a de facto or illegal migration racket. The host country, preferably, is not so alien that the traveller/worker that cannot readily assimilate nor so similar that there is no point being away from family and home.            

The kind of internationalism the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement involves does not impinge upon a partnered country’s sovereignty. Five or so years ago when then-Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott refused to change the terms of the TTA to make it easier for Kiwis to claim social services, as the New Zealand government took upon itself to do for Australian expatriates, the New Zealand leader, John Key, quickly acknowledged one of the pillars of a common travel area: “In the end, we totally respect the sovereign right of the Australian government to make the decision how it will treat people who come and work in Australia.” New Zealand is the only country in the world that has the right, as contained in the Australian constitution, to federate with the Commonwealth of Australia. Political union with Australia is something New Zealand has never sought, since any economic or military advantages derived from a merger could never compensate the renunciation of their cherished autonomy. Australia and New Zealand, in other words, have found a way to forge a productive alliance on any number of issues, from the Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Area to the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels, from the Anzacs to the International Whaling Commission and the Antarctic Treaty System, without emasculating each other’s sovereignty as per the European Union.

The UK, under the leadership of Boris Johnson, would be much better placed to join an expanded TTA once a Brexit deal is finally brokered. After all, it was Mayor Johnson who, way back in 2014, proposed a common travel area between the UK and Australia after hearing first-hand about the plight of an Australian working as a teacher in London. Sally Roycroft had her visa revoked on twenty-seventh birthday. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Johnson fumed that an Australian could be “deprived of a freedom that we legally confer on every French person”. Many of the British PM’s critics have lambasted him as an opportunistic fraud who unscrupulously took charge of the Brexit campaign for his own political advantage, and yet the Sally Roycroft case, which came to his notice during a joyous and triumphant visit to Australia five years ago, shows that he has long been troubled by aspects of the EU, including its propensity to distance the UK from the Anglosphere. UKIP, more daring, prescient and quixotic than the Conservative Party, was never a mainstream entity. Not until Prime Minister David Cameron pledged a referendum on Brexit did the possibility of leaving the EU become a real – if unlikely – possibility for Tories such as Boris Johnson.          

That said, the record shows Johnson supporting the EU – in principle, at least – on any number of occasions, including in parliament in 2003: “In some ways, I am a bit of a fan of the European Union. If we did not have one, we would have to invent something like it.” And yet his past affirmations about the European Union often came with something of a caveat: the reality of an enormous market on the UK’s doorstep and the existence of the EU ought to be an indisputably good thing for the British people. Johnson’s anti-EU politicking during the Brexit referendum – “We are seeing a slow and invisible progress of legal colonization, as the EU infiltrates just about every area of public policy” – does necessarily negate his claims to being “pro-European” and not an “ultra-Eurosceptic”. The problem, from Johnson’s point of view, was not so much the EU’s free-trade arrangements or a common travel area but its burgeoning, supra-national ruling elite who seemed unacquainted with the precepts of the Magna Carta.                                          

The worry, of course, is that the UK’s decision to leave the EU might have come too late, half-a-century too late. The real political opportunists in the UK, from the perspective of this outsider, are the Remainers who have exploited the poisonous ideology of political correctness and identity politics to slander Boris Johnson and Brexiteers as racists, xenophobes, Islamophobes, jingoists, and so on ad nauseum, as if enlightened patriotism and national self-determination were crimes against humanity rather than the kind of raw grit that saw the UK through the Blitz. If the anti-sovereignty forces, the Labor Party and the Liberal Democrats, win the General Election on December 12, there will be no common travel area founded between the UK and Australia/New Zealand, and that will be the end of the story. In that scenario I can imagine a time when even mentioning the subject of “the Anglosphere” will be verboten in the British province of Euroland. 

A Johnson victory, on the other hand, might quell the rising tide of PC hysteria. I certainly hope so because we already have our share of radicals and crazies in Australia and a revised Trans-Tasman Trade Arrangment, expanded to include the UK, will see a lot more Brits here in a regeneration of – as only Boris Johnson could put it – a “throbbing intercontinental two-way pipeline”.