It is now clear that the focus of this government is on managing national decline, not reversing it. The Budget’s big headline – if it can be called that – of £100 off our ludicrously and unnecessarily high energy bills is all the evidence we need that this government’s approach is to create problems with one hand and then offer to compensate us for them with the other – all the while expecting our gratitude.
But for all the Budget’s uneventfulness, there was buried in the small print something more pernicious and revealing of this government’s priorities.
Tucked away on page 118 of the Budget document, the Treasury announced that, from next spring, employers will be allowed to recruit certain foreign workers on lower salaries than the current rules permit. That is to say, the government is making it easier for businesses to rely on immigration rather than recruiting and training Brits.
Let us not forget we have a million Neets. While Alan Milburn beavers away on his long-awaited report into the youth employment crisis and the government pays lip service to its commitment to tackling it, Burnham and Healey have decided to make it easier to hire from abroad.
What is the purpose of spending billions educating our young people who are then unable to secure jobs? Or then spending billions more supporting them as dependents on the state? It should be a truth too obvious to state that a government’s first responsibility is to its own citizens and ensuring they have a reasonable chance of getting a job, but then such sentiments can no longer be taken for granted.
And it is not just this one concession. Elsewhere in the Budget are plans to give some migrant workers longer to find another job if their employment ends, as well as expanding visas for foreign graduates and allowing more international students to remain in Britain after finishing their degrees.
Where did this change to salary thresholds come from? Tellingly, it was recommended by the ‘Migration Advisory Committee’, an influential body headed by a handful of academics but which most people aren’t even aware exists. Once again, the government has delegated one of our most politically salient questions to an unaccountable body of experts. But ultimately the buck stops with ministers. The Migration Advisory Committee’s members are appointed by the home secretary, and its recommendations are not binding. This is a familiar Whitehall trick: turning a political choice into an administrative inevitability.
We can have little confidence that this major change to visa salary requirements will apply only to genuinely ‘skilled’ workers as it is meant to. The Centre for Government Reform — which I run — recently found that more than 3,600 takeaways across the country are eligible to sponsor skilled worker visas. Frying chicken is apparently highly technical work.
It is also worth reflecting on the sheer brass-neck of all this. Alan Milburn’s interim report into Neets puts the annual economic and social cost of this national failure at an estimated £125 billion and warns that too many employers have become accustomed to looking overseas rather than recruiting and training people at home. In paragraph 283, he directly addresses employers’ reliance on immigration and suggests that employers may have been on ‘easy street’ for too long, able to recruit overseas rather than look for workers closer to home. Milburn suggests that falling immigration offers an opportunity to change employers’ behaviour. But apparently the government’s solution to having a million young people doing nothing is to find somebody else to do the jobs.
‘We will wean our national economy off its reliance on cheap labour,’ Starmer wrote
There is an even more remarkable contradiction. Labour’s own immigration white paper, published last year, promised to raise salary requirements and ensure that recruiting from abroad never becomes a cheap alternative to paying people properly. In the paper’s foreword, Starmer wrote: ‘We will wean our national economy off its reliance on cheap labour from overseas…That is what our economy needs. It is what people want.’
This is all symptomatic of the gulf between what Labour ministers say and what this government actually does. Shabana Mahmood — who once fooled us into thinking she was an immigration hardliner — is busy creating new legal routes for refugees, sponsored by community groups, universities and, soon, employers too. The Home Office happily announced yesterday that the first of these community-sponsored arrivals would start arriving in autumn next year.
For a government which claims to want to ‘Get Britain Working’, making it easier to recruit workers from abroad while almost a million young Brits remain languishing without work is an odd way of going about it. And even more tragic is what it suggests: that Labour appears to have so little faith in the people that it governs.
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