European travel crunch

Christine Jardine MP sounds a warning about Brexit cutting off flights to continental Europe from the UK. Three Blokes in the Pub have already spelled out the reasons why and have revealed that the relevant institutions have already redefined air routes to by-pass the UK.

I would pick Ms Jardine up on one point, though. Victorian Britain was more liberal in respect of people's movement than the ages that followed, as an article in the Independent asserted:

The tolerance of Victorian and Edwardian Britain reveals itself in a series of ways. In the first place, amazing as it may seem today, Britain had no immigration laws for most of the 19th century[...]Britons also welcomed refugees for much of the 19th century. British high society responded positively to the arrival of wealthy and educated Italian exiles escaping the straitjacket imposed on nationalism and liberalism by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Their symbolic position as victims of Continental oppression guaranteed their positive status.

Similarly, German exiles also received a positive response when they arrived in England, as evidenced by the example of the middle class and liberal Gottfried Kinkel, although the left wing Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not get quite the same treatment. On the other hand, the Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth found himself fêted as an opponent of Habsburg tyranny in public meetings and in the press, becoming one of the greatest heroes in Victorian England until the Italian nationalist Garibaldi replaced him.

Just as importantly, while Victorian society may appear predominantly Anglo-Saxon, immigrants had an obvious impact in a variety of ways. In the first place, newcomers helped the industrialisation process, whether in the form of Irish navvies and factory workers, helping to build the infrastructure and produce the industrial goods which made Britain the first industrial nation, or prominent German entrepreneurs, whose skills helped establish the basis of many of Britain's leading firms such as Schroders, Kleinworts, Rothschilds, ICI and Tennents. At the same time, immigrants helped to create the British inner city, epitomised by the East End of London, which changed from Irish to German to Jewish between 1840 and 1914. Catering would not have developed in the way it did in Britain without migration.

During the late Victorian period continental settlers established some of the most famous restaurants in London including the Café Royal and the Ritz. At the same time Germans, Frenchmen and the Swiss staffed restaurants of all sizes throughout the country by the outbreak of the First World War, as this French concept of bourgeois dining (the restaurant) spread throughout Britain. Meanwhile, German musicians helped to transform music in Britain during the 19th century, as indicated by names such as Sir Charles Hallé, who founded the Manchester orchestra which bears his name after fleeing the 1848 revolutions, and Frederick Delius, born in Bradford in 1863 to middle class German parents. Germans also helped to staff many of the major British orchestras which would emerge during the course of the 19th century. At the same time German brass bands marched up and down the country during the late Victorian and Edwardian years, joining Italian organ grinders.

- and industry in France and Germany benefited from foreign workers. What changed was the flood of refugees fleeing anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, which decreasing travel costs aided. The UK government reacted with the Aliens Act of 1905 (four years after the death of Victoria). The Great War of 1914-18 then virtually ended passport-free travel throughout Europe until the Schengen Agreement.