It's not the British Government that's messing with music

We do not say that this couldn’t have been better handled. But we would insist that it’s not the British Government causing the problems here:

My passport would need to be submitted to the Spanish embassy and held there until the visa was processed, causing problems for when I had to travel for other work. Apparently the normal visa cost would be nearer £150, but with the embassy currently open one day a week, the promoter had told my agent the only option would be to pay for the £600 fast-track one.

The concert in Spain, one of the few remaining non-Covid cancellations in my diary, is part of a tour that also takes in recitals in France and Denmark. Pull out of one engagement because the numbers don’t stack up, and risk losing the work in the other countries as well. Too many visas, even at £150 each (and that figure obviously doesn’t include cost of travel to the embassies, the lost work time, or the extra costs to agents and accountants) and it’s clear that your livelihood is going to take a nosedive. Brexit means that musicians now need to apply for a short-term work permit before travelling to work in a number of EU countries, each with their own different requirements.

Just a small hint that we’d pass on. The British passport system specifically allows at least one more than one passport to be issued to a person. Exactly so that one can be floating around the varied visa systems while the other is being used to travel. We’d suggest that people use the part of the system set up to aid with this problem.

Slightly more to the headline point we’d point out that these visa requirements are not things being imposed by the British government. They are, obviously enough, being imposed by the varied ones of the remnant European Union. They are also not new.

True, it’s new that they are being imposed upon Brits. But they have been imposed all along on non-European Union citizens who desire to do that little bit of musical touring across the area. What we are now seeing is the costs imposed upon non-EU musicians plus, of course, the costs imposed upon EU citizens by the barriers to their enjoying music made by non-EU citizens.

This is true of all of the varied limitations and problems being mentioned, like those for oysters, the colour of ink forms are filled in with and so on. It is only now that we’re subject to them for our own exports that we can see the costs we’ve been paying these decades in imports we’ve not been able to have from non-EU economic actors.

Whether this changes your calculus of whether Brexit was a good idea or not is an entirely different question. We simply want to point out that these are the hoops that 6.5 billion people have had to jump through for decades to send us their lovely produce and musicians. These are, that is, the costs we had to bear when we were still EU members, those loss of all of those lovely things.