Britain and Australia should set up a “free labour mobility zone” to end an “outrageous and indefensible” discrimination that puts European Union workers before Commonwealth nationals, Boris Johnson said.
The London mayor said it was time to recognise the “immense opportunities” of striking stronger links with fast-growing economies rather than within the “microclimate of economic gloom” that Europe had become because of the single currency.
He said the UK should tell Brussels to “stuff it” if it objected to the move inspired by a teacher who says she was forced to leave London.
The senior Tory, who is holidaying in Australia, was given a letter by Sally Roycroft, an Australian who had been working in London schools. She was “effectively kicked out of Britain” for not being from the EU.
“She is Australian; and she has been told to bog off by the authorities in our country because it was, they said, too much of a palaver to go through the business of ‘sponsoring’ her to stay,” Mr Johnson said.
It was the “infamous consequence” of joining the European Community when Britain “betrayed our relationships with Commonwealth countries”, he suggested.
Mr Johnson said: “We British are more deeply connected with the Australians culturally and emotionally than with any other country on Earth.”
They also voted to keep the Queen as head of state, he noted, if only “because all the alternatives looked too ghastly”.
“It makes it all the more disgusting that we are treating Sally Roycroft in this way,” he said.
“It is time to undo the damage of 1973, and give her exactly the same freedom of establishment that we give, say, a French teacher trying to find a job in London.
“It is time for Britain and Australia to set up a bilateral free labour mobility zone. It would be good for the UK, where skilled people like Sally would no longer face an absurd discrimination.
“It would be good for Australia, where the unspoken reality is that Australians are actually quite keen to encourage more immigration from Britain, and it would be a small but practical way of intensifying British links with the growing economy of Oceania. It would be an assertion that we are no longer thinking of ourselves as little Europeans, run by Brussels, but as a country with a truly global perspective.
“I suppose there might be some objection from the EU but they should be told firmly to stuff it. There is already variable geometry in EU border control arrangements.
“It is outrageous and indefensible that Sally Roycroft is deprived of a freedom that we legally confer on every French person.”