Dear Europe ... Missing you already

I have now had three weeks to think about the referendum outcome (what a three weeks it has been!), and the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the result reflects profound fractures running through UK society, and through its constitutional settlement. Little is clear at this stage, but one thing is: there are many different reasons why people voted to leave. Some held strongly principled and well-reasoned positions while others did not; some were well-informed, while others swallowed whole the mendacious lies of the Leave campaign; some were concerned about the economic and social impact of migration, and a few were racist; and, importantly, many people appear simply to have felt that the EU specifically, and the political and establishment elite more generally, are irrelevant to their lives, and, as a result of this sense of alienation, were happy to put the boot in.

Perhaps the EU is irrelevant to many people – although I do not really believe this; and perhaps the establishment elite merited a good kicking – certainly those of us to whom EU membership is of profound importance fundamentally failed to explain why this is so, and failed to engage others in our concerns. So I will try to explain here why EU membership mattered, and matters, to me.

I’m probably one of the establishment elite. I am a professor in law at an ancient university which is a member of the Russell Group; among my friends I count politicians, senior civil servants, and journalists and commentators; my wife is a neurologist; and I enjoy economic and cultural opportunities which are not available to the majority of the citizens of this country. I am certainly an expert (in competition law) – and I am proud of this. It has taken me eight years of study at university level, plus 25 years of engagement to reach this position. I am a higher rate taxpayer. I also do my absolute best to try to enhance the lives of all the students I teach – many of these students are Scottish.

Without the EU I would not be in this position, or I would be in a considerably diminished version of it. This is no exaggeration: the very subject of my expertise is grounded, for the most part, in European Union law. I have had educational, cultural, and economic opportunities through the EU that I could not otherwise have accessed.

I was born in 1963, one week to the day after the assassination of John Kennedy, 18 years after hostilities in the Second World War ceased in Europe, and 10 years before the UK joined what is now the European Union. When my parents met, both were serving in the British Army: my mother was a sergeant just before being discharged prior to her marriage, and my father was a sergeant who was not required to leave the army on marriage. They were married in Aden (now Yemen), one of the then remaining British imperial outposts, where I was born. By the time I left home to go to university I had lived in Yemen, Germany and Hong Kong, as well as in the UK. To a strong degree my life was grounded in an experience of dying empire.

Here are some things I remember: the death of my grandfather, who had been a dockworker in Plymouth through the Second World War, and who died of cancer never having travelled outside England. I remember my father coming home from work one morning after a night on duty in the Berlin British Sector during which he had dealt with the aftermath of someone being shot coming over the wall (this would have been in 1970 or 1971). I remember going through Checkpoint Charlie into the Eastern Sector with my mother with the token British Military Police patrol to assert a functionally useless "right", feeling, but not fully understanding the tension of watching through the car windows (the instructions had been very clear – we weren’t allowed to open the car door or the window) as people, who seemed so similar to us, went about their very different lives. I remember crossing land borders in Europe, nervously navigating a customs/border post, passing through "no-man’s land", and then through a second border post. I remember debating in class in 1975 whether the UK should leave the Common Market, and not understanding the issues. I remember hoping that my extra bottle of wine, or packet of cigarettes, would escape the notice of the ever-vigilant customs officer when returning to the UK after a European holiday.

Then things began to change, and I remember the pleasure in being able quickly to progress through airports and ports in Europe when my part-time work at University gave me just enough money to travel cheaply; the joy, after the completion of the Single European Market of being able to test the limits of my £240 first car’s suspension with cheap (but not so nasty) French wine and German beer; and perhaps most poignantly given my childhood, the ecstasy of those around me in East Germany on the last night it existed, with church bells ringing out at the moment of reunification in October 1990.

Between 1963 and 1982, when I went to university in Newcastle upon Tyne, there was dramatic change in European and British society. The development of the EU itself had been presaged in the late 1940s, and the UK had joined in 1973; in 1975 there was a resounding vote for Remain. By the early 1980s these influences were directly impacting my university studies (I read economics and law), and were reflected in the student experience. I developed a love for my subject, and a love for as much European travel as I could afford and fit in. I spent the summer of 1985, after graduation, in Nice attempting to learn French, before taking a postgraduate degree at Exeter. There I worked alongside students from other European countries – France, Belgium, Germany and Spain. They made me aware of the very different challenges, and opportunities, that were beginning to develop in the European economy. At Glasgow Law School we take great efforts to secure student mobility for as many of our students as we can persuade to take up the opportunity. These students return after a semester or a year in another EU university, for the most part academically and personally stronger; they are likely to have enhanced language skills, and are sought after by employers. The student exchange programme they engage in was developed, and is substantially funded, by the European Commission. While our students are elsewhere in Europe, students from Europe come to study here – you will have met them on the streets of our cities, working in our bars and restaurants, and travelling around Scotland in the vacation periods. They strengthen significantly the educational and cultural experience offered by all of our universities, and my classes are better for their presence. The Erasmus programme is a potent symbol of EU co-operation at its very best. It has had a significant impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of UK students.

I took up my first full-time university post in London in 1993. I developed an expertise in my subject, and my first book (half of which dealt with EU law) was published in 1999. Through the Erasmus network I developed a connection with a colleague in Sweden. We were given EU funding to create one of the first wholly online courses anywhere in the world (this was way back in 1998). Eventually this translated into a part-time teaching engagement in a very good Swedish University for a couple of days every other week. I was funded by the EU to participate in training Swedish judges.

In 2002 I accepted a job at an excellent Polish university. Economic migration works in both directions! My academic expertise, and ability to teach law in English, was desirable as Poland was gearing up for EU membership. My friends and colleagues there were hugely excited by the new opportunities arising, and must now be looking at the UK vote with bewilderment. For the most part they, like me, viewed the EU as an exercise in democratic partnership and many saw membership as the ultimate symbol of freedom after decades of repression. I was in Poland when it acceded to the EU. From time to time I would drive through to Berlin, or take the train to other member states in the former Eastern bloc. One day, border posts, identity checks, and queues were there; the next day they weren’t.

Just as I migrated to Sweden and to Poland, at Glasgow University I have many colleagues who are themselves EU migrants. In my subject I work alongside a professor with Portuguese nationality who has devoted herself for decades to providing the best possible experience for her UK and international students, and a new younger French colleague, with a cutting-edge PhD. Between us we can provide a better education for our students than would be possible without this diversity. I continue to benefit from EU funding – my Portuguese colleague and I recently trained judges in Malta; and I have trained judges from across Europe in Spain. We learn, as well as teach, on these occasions, and bring better knowledge and experience back to our students. Many of my colleagues benefit from EU grant funding, which is unlikely to be reproduced as generously in a wholly UK context post-Brexit. This grant funding provides fundamental support and development to UK universities, and results in both better research, and better teaching.

For my entire adult life EU membership has given me the opportunity and the right to travel freely across most of Europe – the scope of my experience could not be more different from that of my grandfather, who did not have the opportunity, and for whom travel would have been a privilege, not a right. I have spent time in all bar two of the EU member states. While the wording on a UK passport exhorts officials "to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance", it is the EU that has done the better job of securing this in Europe than the UK ever managed to do. I hope my students have the same opportunities in the future as I have enjoyed for 40 years. Now I am 52, I contemplate the possibility of retiring in France. A modified form of membership of the European Economic Area (perhaps now the least bad option for the UK as a whole) would not permit this as of right, and would moderate the rights of free movement considerably; sadly it appears to be the will of many British citizens that this happens. During my recent weekend in London I could not help noticing that 100% of my interactions with those from whom I was purchasing goods and services (in hotels, restaurants, in shops and at venues) were with people who were most likely migrants into this country. My wife is a migrant into the UK, and like many others,works to save lives in the NHS.

I have not here even begun to set out the benefits I will have received from the free flow of goods into and out of the UK, from the free movement of services, from driving around the Highlands of Scotland on roads improved by EU funding, of knowing that many of my working conditions are guaranteed by EU law and … well, the list is endless.

Mine is but one of the 16,141,241 individual stories that can be told by those who voted to remain in the EU. I hope, however, that I have done a better job of explaining why I now feel bereft by the outcome than the Remain campaigners did in explaining the benefits of EU membership ahead of the referendum. I regret profoundly that they, and I, did not do more to reach across the fault lines running through the UK body politic.

Mark Furse is Professor of Competition Law and Policy, School of Law, University of Glasgow