Forget passports – Brexit has robbed us of so much more

Unlike Sean O’Grady, I was happy to leave behind my old blue cardboard British passport with all its personal and imperial associations, along with the painful memories of my father’s Morris Minor within which I failed to learn to drive. A future predicated on fresh opportunities and new relationships seemed to be more attractive to me than a clinging on to the illusory comforts of the past. It is an attitude that I hope my children and grandchildren have adopted as well.

On a recent visit to Ireland, a couple of my Irish friends told me of the life-enhancing opportunities currently being enjoyed by their offspring, one of whom has been thriving as an Erasmus student for a year in Prague, while the other has recently returned from a year studying under the same initiative in the USA. They will, no doubt, be using their EU passports to travel freely around their home continent in the years to come.

As Sean O’Grady says, the denial of such opportunities is something for which those who voted for Brexit have only themselves to blame, chastened I hope when meeting those young people who were too young to vote at the time of the referendum and for whom the Erasmus project is a closed door.