Just Col

Look what’s lurking on page 118 of the Budget document… Once again, the government has delegated one of our most politically salient questions to an unaccountable body of experts … 👇 “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. 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” Spectator.