Wednesday, September 06, 2017

How to strangle the economy the Brexit way

We now have a glimpse of Brexit Britain following the leaking of a government paper on immigration in the brave new world after March 2019. The Brexit extremists have clearly put a great deal of work into this report, looking at all sorts of ways to strangle the economy by making the UK as unwelcoming as possible to anyone from abroad (except for Australian media tycoons and PR bosses) who want to pay taxes here and contribute to the economy. We are told that there are too many unskilled workers coming here but we have an unemployment rate of less than 5% and a crying need for unskilled Labour which the Brits are not filling.

The extremist Brexiteers, according to this report, will put up as many barriers as possible to both skilled and unskilled foreign workers. Unskilled workers will be kicked out of the country after either one or two years, leaving the soft fruit in Lincolnshire to rot on the shrubs, hotels to close due to staff shortages and elderly patients to be stuck in hospital, bed-blocking, because care homes can't recruit sufficient staff. And even skilled staff are going to be kicked out after five years. Maybe to fill the resulting gap in the NHS, the Brexit extremists can get the bed-blocking elderly patients to retrain as GPs and nurses (as long as they are British patients - none of these health tourists please though trying to be any kind of tourist in the UK will be a bit of a challenge if the hotels can't recruit the staff needed.)

The direction of travel is clear under the Brexit extremists: keeping out foreigners is far more important than the economy, wealth creation and prosperity. Let's hope this report ends up being shredded.

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