Theresa May knows we don’t want freedom of movement to end – but she’s selling it as our idea anyway

Has a government minister ever sounded so triumphant about removing freedom from his citizens? Let’s imagine for a moment that the home secretary Sajid Javid wasn’t trumpeting “the biggest change in our immigration system in over four decades” on Monday but, say, an overhaul of blasphemy laws.

Would the Daily Express have been so tumescent with glee?

“COMPLETE END TO FREEDOM OF WORSHIP! Home sec promises to GET TOUGH on non-believers”. What if his geographical focus were slightly smaller? “VICTORY: Government to make it HARDER to get to Lincolnshire!”

It would be weird wouldn’t it? But the reality is no less weird. Theresa May’s government is doing its utmost to lower your horizons, to thwart any aspirations you or your children might have had to start a business in Sweden, or study in the Netherlands, or relocate to France.

If you don’t meet the minimum income requirement, you may no longer be able to afford a Polish wife or German husband. If you’re one of the 1.3 million British citizens who lives in an EU countries – even if you might like to do that at some point – well, life is going to be a bit harder. Freedom of movement works both ways.

The government is, moreover, refusing to reveal any details of the legal mechanisms through which they intend to pen you in and others out. Javid gallantly explained that it was “very unlikely” that the legal white paper on immigration would be published before the vote on May’s Brexit deal on 11 December. The attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, has all but admitted that this puts him in contempt of parliament since MPs can’t really be expected to vote on something they cannot see. A pre-vote vote is now expected; the parliamentary machinations have an extra layer of complication.

Except that it isn’t that complicated, really. When it comes down to it, all the lies and ignominy, all the disinformation and distraction, all the family schisms and raging monologues, all the precious, irretrievable attention you have devoted to this ridiculous scheme... it was all about making it harder for some people to move from one imaginary place to another.

May has made it clear that ending freedom of movement “once and for all” is the non-negotiable feature of Brexit. Even though it will almost certainly make us poorer. Even though there are other less restrictive options: the Norway model, for example. Even though there’s no real moral justification for borders anyway. And even though no British citizen has ever voted to end freedom of movement.

It’s true, a little over half of the electorate voted to leave the European Union. Fears of immigration and a sketchily defined urge to “take back control” were a prime motivation for many Leavers, as surveys have shown. But that’s hardly conclusive.

According to the British Social Attitudes survey, the younger and more educated you are, the more likely you are to believe that immigration is good for the economy; older people and non-graduates are more likely to say immigration is bad. But the same survey found that British people wanted more public spending and more individual freedom. And since when did we govern by poll? For what it’s worth: 64 per cent of adults want to renationalise the railways; 66 per cent favour higher taxes to fund the NHS; and 55 per cent of people still don’t like May’s deal.

Ending freedom of movement has nonetheless become as totemic to May’s government as austerity was to David Cameron’s: the nasty procedure that she insists must be performed. Her determination is based, we might assume, on her own frustrating experience trying to make Cameron’s bad maths add up in her time at the Home Office; and a misguided belief that it will make certain people in austerity hit communities feel better to see Spanish nurses, Lithuanian fruit-pickers and Romanian plasterers expunged.

Who knows? Maybe it will for a bit. The point is, this is what she has chosen, not what the British public has chosen.

There’s a word for what she is doing: lying. It might be a bloody-minded, self-effacing sort of lying, to contrast with the obfuscating, self-aggrandising lying of a Boris Johnson; or the tactical, self-satisfied lying of a George Osborne. But it is lying nonetheless. And lying, in case it needed stressing, is bad. Disinformation seeps into a country’s bloodstream. Further lies are required. Austerity spawned Brexit. What lies will Brexit spawn? “The transition is complete when people can no longer distinguish between truth and feeling,” as Timothy Snyder wrote in his recent analysis of authoritarianism in the New York Times.

May is no demagogue. But she might be his midwife. The glee with which the end of freedom of movement is being celebrated in certain quarters shows a disturbing taste for restriction, a dark comfort sought by the fearful and the angry. Given the stark age divide where it comes to freedom of movement, we effectively have one set of people telling their children to stop getting ideas above their station, to put up and shut up.

We’ve seen this film before. Imagine if at the end of Billy Elliot, the boy’s family doubled down, threw his ballet shoes into the fire and forced him down the pit instead. This effectively is the deal May is offering the country. She should at least be honest about it.