Carl Mortished: Brexit means we have lost our kids’ most precious right

Forget the shouting, the blaming, the who did what and when. In a divorce, the first and last thing is, what’s best for the kids. It is the golden rule; they are blameless, after all, and even as we lie and hide money and plot hideous revenge on our spouse, we worry: “Oh god, what if I lose them?”

It is unfathomable. In all the hullabaloo over leaving the EU, no one has given serious consideration to the only question that will really matter over time: what happens to the kids?

They have rights, the kids. Tangible rights to something that is valuable today and for every child in Britain should be a birthright until the day they die — to be a citizen of Europe, to be able to move across the Continent freely and to live and work anywhere that he or she pleases, from Galway to Gdansk and from Stockholm to Seville.

At the end of March, for British children, that right is extinguished. It’s not just scrapped for future generations; it is ripped out of the hands of your offspring; torn up in front of their eyes.

Never in the remembered history of this country has any government wilfully torn up a right so precious that belongs to the nation’s children and unborn children. It has been allowed to happen without more than a moment’s thought. Our politicians blather on about tariffs, market access, barriers to trade. No one considers the most important economic, political and human right of all. The right to wander freely, to settle, to work, to set up a business, to marry, raise a family and to establish yourself in another place.

In Britain, we understand little of what rights mean in the modern world. Slavery was abolished long ago; we know we can speak freely and every adult has a vote.

When we talk of rights, we talk of aspiration: a right to a home, a right to a job, a right to free healthcare, a right to equal pay. These are not really rights; if they exist at all, they are duties. If I have a right to free healthcare, it is because everyone has agreed to take on the duty to provide it to me (and everyone else) by paying taxes. It’s not a right at all. It is a communal provision that may wax and wane, depending on communal wealth and the whim of governments to fund healthcare.

In Britain, we think we invented rights — something called Magna Carta, a document signed at Runnymede by King John and a group of barons in 1215.

Schoolchildren are told it was the first charter of rights but it was nothing of the sort. The barons wanted protection from being robbed and imprisoned by the King and they didn’t want to pay taxes; it’s a shopping list of demands. The King was weak and the barons forced him to sign.

Magna Carta is not about rights; it is about thugs doing a deal with the Godfather. The political mythology of Magna Carta explains why Britain struggles to understand the nature of the EU, its constitution and that precious right of free movement that so many would consign to the bin.