In the wake of Theresa May's Florence speech I've heard another wave of arguments that "we should have guaranteed EU expats' rights from the start". The Leave campaigns, being in no position to be held to account for it, were quite happy to make the "pledge", but government has been much more reticent from 24 June 2016 onwards.
May & co haven't gone as far as UKIP's Lord Pearson of Rannock, who suggested that expats should be used "as hostages in the negotiations" but May, then Home Secretary and leadership candidate, told us last July: "I want to ensure that we are able to not just guarantee the positions of those people but guarantee the positions of British citizens in other member states" but she didn't want to go further for fear of attracting a "surge" of migration from the EU in the run-up to actual withdrawal.
On Friday I heard Diane Abbott (Labour, Hackney North and Stoke Newington, majority 35,139) pushing the "do it now" line, and Penny Mordaunt (Conservative, Portsmouth North, majority 9,965) crowing that she'd been saying the same thing throughout the referendum campaign. And of both of them I ask: what rights, and who gets them?
The rights of citizens of the EU while in another EU country are specified by a variety of EU directives and implemented by the member states to fit in with citizenship, residence and immigration policies which are otherwise up to each country. There is no suitable status which could be granted under UK law other than EU citizen, which exists now but under Tory and Labour policy would be abolished. May & co have had to invent a new "settled status", the terms of which are now (slowly) being thrashed out.
And who gets this status? We don't know who's here now, and we won't know who's arrived in another week's time. We could have required incomers to register - many other countries do - and we could have used the same rules to require EU expats who've been here for three months to "go home", but we chose not to, perhaps for good reason.
How many people we're talking about, and how to get to them, was a major part of the discussion when the Commons DExEU committee spoke to representatives of various think tanks in February. Some of these people would be easy to find, was the message, others less so, but the fact remains that there are millions of them, and the Home Office will need a) lots more resources and b) to perform much better than it's famous for to deal with them.
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The subject of what rights expats should get is about the only area of the Article 50 negotiations where progress can be seen, as the two teams have put together a clunky table representing areas of agreement and disagreement after the third round of talks (there are 15 pages of this).
But then came Florence, and May took a question from an Italian journalist:
"As you said, 600,000 Italians now live in the UK. You said that you want them to remain. What is going to change for them – I guess something is going to change?"
and replied:
"We set out that for those EU citizens currently living in the UK who have made the UK their home, including those 600, 000 Italians who are in the UK, we want them to be able to stay and to have the same rights as they have at the moment."
This is discussed by Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at King's College London, in his blog. The problem is that the government has "set out" no such thing. The proposed settled status doesn't, for example, give an EU expat resident in the UK the continuing, automatic right to be joined by his or her family.
We are going to be told tomorrow that Mrs May "misspoke", that of course she didn't mean that, and by Wednesday the message will be that she didn't say it either. These people couldn't organise a presentation to the press in a hotel room in Reading.
