Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

Indeed, I saw people pointing out yesterday that rising wages but without accompanying rising growth or productivity is very risky and could quickly lead to rampant inflation.

This whole "we have been instructed by the British public to end the high immigration / low wage economy" line from the Tories is a bit mind boggling.

How do you bring down a government with a 80 odd seat majority ?

I saw a Twitter thread today showing that many EU countries have stronger growth, have higher wages and are more productive than the UK (and it's been like this for years). The Brexiteer argument that EU membership and freedom of movement holds back countries economically and forces down wages is clearly bogus and invented.

I'm looking forward to the 8 million in London walking down to their local farm to pick up their milk veg and meat going forward.

Ti's a great Tory plan.

Neal Richmond is an embarrassment to the Dail at this stage. He spends his day on twitter attacking members of the British cabinet.

Any chance this lad can be told to shut up before he damages relations even more between them and us?

What does Johnson mean by "uncontrolled immigration" then (on Marr today)?. Limited supply would suggest nobody wants to move to the UK.

Obviously however those policies are more cumbersome, unwieldy, costly & bureaucratic though.

Previously if British companies needed HGV drivers and couldn't find one in UK they could just call up someone abroad in EU to deliver.

Now that person faces a requirement for holding a passport, obtaining an expensive work permit and UK health insurance - but only after the company/its industry has lobbied the government for several months & the problems have got so out of hand the government has no choice but to intervene.

An expensive inefficient bureaucratic nightmare.

What is your point, exactly?

So the UK can have a needs based policy - great.

However, it doesn't really suggest that their policy is particularly well thought out (or thought out at all) when it suddenly finds it's needs have a massive skills deficit, literally, overnight.

And their grand plan solution to fill that shortfall?

A combination of chucking away the rule book so that everyone can do their bit (fade in patriotic sounding music) by driving a truck or towing a trailer (who needs to know how to reverse a 40 ton tractor-trailer around corners). And in the meantime appealing to the very people it tarred as being responsible for driving down wages and conditions, taking British jobs, fuelling a race to the bottom, etc. etc. etc. to come and dig it out of the hole they've dug themselves into (but only until such time they've sorted themselves out, then those people can bloody well go back to where they came from again).

As for using Australia as an example, when Australia has 27 nations with open borders surrounding it on three sides, has shifted their economy heavily towards services as opposed to supplying goods or raw materials, and is the head of a Commonwealth of Nations, well then we look at comparisons because until such time that Australia has those scenarios facing it, there is no comparison to Australia's immigration needs and the UK's.

It can't have any immigration policy it wants - its immigration policy with the EU will be by definition more cumbersome, slower, expensive, more bureaucratic & inefficient and therefore a drag on the economy as compared to FOM.

As regards everyone else, it is in exactly the same position as it ever was - so why are things better now?

Couple of points:

Even inside the EU, they could of course regulate non-EU immigration however they wanted. They could have run a needs-based immigration policy covering 90% of the world's population. But they didn't.

And, inside the EU, they had some powers over EU migration which they chose never to exercise, which doesn't suggest that controlling EU migration was a priority.

Now that they are outside the EU, they can, in theory, run a needs-based immigration policy covering 100% of the world's population. But if they weren't interested in doing so for 90%, why would it be so hugely valuable to be able to do so for 100%?

One possible answer is that the theoretical right to run a needs-based immigration policy is of little value if you don't have the practical capacity to do so. And I think we have powerful evidence right now that the UK doesn't have the practical capacity to do so. They have acute problems with labour supply for (a) logistics and (b) agricultural work. If they had an effective needs-based policy they wouldn't have those problems.

And, even now, when they have decided to adjust their migration requirements to address those problems, they have made adjustments to immigration policy which, it is pretty universally agreed, will not in fact address them. Why? Because political and ideological considerations prevent them from making the kind of changes to immigration policy which would address the problems they have.

Which underlines the point; the theoretical right to run a needs-based immigration policy is of little value when (a) you never seemed to want to run one before; (b) you aren't in practice capable of running and effective and efficient needs-based policy, and (c) even if you could, political and ideological constraints mean that you wouldn't.