There has been a lot of fake fuss concerning, post-Brexit, the 3 million EU citizens currently residing here in the UK, and the 1 million UK citizens currently residing in the continental EU.

Undoubtedly, some Remainer Lords indulged in frantic virtue signalling, while others, worse, argued with a blatant intent to put spokes in the Article 50 wheel. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to put the matter of our 3 million EU citizens to bed. Let’s face it, we all know that, eventually, the UK will allow those EU citizens, who are currently here, to stay. We’re not going to kick them out.

40% of founders of new tech companies and over 50% of software engineers in London are from overseas, with the majority of those from the EU. Just as we’ll want existing EU citizens to stay here, we can assume that the EU will take the same approach with our citizens who are over there, letting them stay (although we can’t know for sure – because it is not up to us).

We know that our Government has quietly reached out to the EU and asked for a quick deal to be done, on the basis of both sets of citizens being allowed to stay where they are; and that the EU has slapped us in response, refusing to talk about it until we agree to pay them their “exit tax”, the €60 billion they allege we will owe them… not likely, matey. This EU manoeuvre has induced the Government to treat the topic as part of the Brexit negotiations, viewing a guarantee to the 3 million as a negotiating concession that should only be surrendered in return for something conceded from the other side. But is that right?

Well, all this fuss is predicated on the assumption that the EU would actively prefer us to guarantee to their nationals that they are free to stay in the UK; and that from our side we need, and should want, to give away negotiating capital in persuading the various EU countries to allow our overseas UK citizens to stay in those countries.

But both assumptions are wrong, as a moment’s reflection will reveal.

For a start, there’s no evidence that the negotiators on the EU side give a damn about their EU citizens who are living (most of them productively working) here. The EU negotiators may or may not see those EU citizens in the UK as outright traitors, but the EU’s need to be nice to them is not going to be high. After all, these are striving entrepreneurial types who upped sticks, left the EU on the other side of the Channel mostly without a backward glance, and came here for a better start and a better life.

Yes, a lot of them – many Bulgarians and Romanians for example – came here because anything was going to be better than staying in their low-wage, high-unemployment home country, but the larger part of the 3 million are hundreds of thousands each of well-educated, well-qualified Germans, Irish, French, Beneluxembourgeois, Scandinavians, and so on: almost all (so long as adult and below retirement age) working; adding to our society; an integral part of our country’s make-up and productively contributing to our economy.

For the higher-paid, higher-qualified of them – those in the City of London, say – the presence of each one generates on average several jobs for British citizens. In short, overall the 3 million are a great resource for our country. Only a government with a static view of how an economy works would consider it better to have them away from their home country rather than back in it, contributing to that economy. The EU will not beg us to keep them; it should see it as a great victory for the EU if we sent them home.