Originally Posted by
flygod
That's a very old article, and that's why passports are now checked at St Pancras for trains that stop at Lille.
Or travel to the Irish Republic and just walk over the border. Then take the ferry to Scotland. The border controls for the ferry have just been scrapped (to save money) because this is an "internal" frontier!
The UK and Ireland (along with the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands) form what is known as the Common Travel Area (CTA). It's like a mini-Schengen, or like the Benelux countries or the Nordic Passport Union pre-Schengen. This is not a loophole, it's how it's designed to be. A common border.
Perhaps you would like your foreign spouse (of either sex, nowadays) to come and live with you in the UK. No problem. Just live in Dublin - or any other EU city in the EU country you are not a passport holder of - and then you are "exercising your Treaty of Rome rights". Provided you have exercised your treaty rights for six months at some time in your life, it is against Article 8 of the Euro Human Rights Act to prevent you from enjoying a "family life". So against EU law to insist on visas, work permits etc for your spouse.
The procedures for bringing a foreign spouse into one's own EU country are indeed somewhat simpler if the family has previously lived in another EU country. But this is the same everywhere in the EU, and what's wrong here is not the ease with which families can move from one EU country to another, but the fact that some EU countries make it so difficult for nationals to bring in their foreign spouses.
And the right to a family life is something that predates the EU - it's in the UN Convention on Human Rights. East Germans were invoking it back in in the Cold War years when they applied to their government for exit permits to join immediate family members in the West.
As regards foreign spouses moving to the UK from other EU countries, if the spouse is a visa national they still need something similar to a visa to come to the UK (it's called an EEA family permit), and spouses of British citizens can work in the UK regardless of whether or not they lived in another EU country first.
So - no real loopholes here, except in that one can speed up procedures and save a lot of hassle if one has lived in another EU country first. But how many people are able to just up sticks and move to another country for six months, just to reduce the amount of bureaucracy that they have to go through to bring in a foreign spouse?