Britain’s post-brexit immigration policy is shameful and amounts to abuse of power
I HAVE for years felt exceedingly uncomfortable concerning successive UK governments’ attitudes to inbound immigration, in particular that the country has unashamedly sought to attract “the best and the brightest” from other countries, many of which can ill afford to lose their own homegrown talent, especially in sectors like medicine, life sciences, IT and engineering.
I feel a sense of shame that the UK seeks to plunder the best people from abroad, rather than train enough of our own and pay/ treat them sufficiently well to discourage them from seeking better pay, terms and conditions in other better developed nations, although I am not sufficiently naive to believe that seeking international experience in either direction is necessarily a bad thing.
However, reading the UK Government’s latest, post-brexit, points-based system, which the Home Office confirms “will include a route for skilled workers” (and, by implication, exclude a route for those they consider to be “unskilled workers”, presumably including the very hospital porters, cleaners, laundry and cleaning staff who ensured the Prime Minister was kept clean, fed and watered during his recent spell in ICU), my discomfort has turned to revulsion in what could be reasonably viewed as legitimised, 21st century human trafficking (“Immigration rules branded a ‘slap in the face’ for vital care workers”, The Herald, July 14).
And by depleting the professional resources of less welloff nations, especially in the healthcare sector during the Covid-19 pandemic, the hardright, English exceptionalist flank of what Boris Johnson has the effrontery to call “One Nation Conservatism” (one nation, right enough and the others, it seems, can go to hell) should – but won’t – be utterly ashamed of itself.
Sufficient Thursday nights appear now to have lapsed since his recent near-death experience that the most unprincipled Home Secretary since Theresa May and her “hostile environment” feels able to revisit the classification of care workers – invariably on the minimum wage and often at extreme and even deadly personal risk – as “unskilled”.
The Conservative Party, it would seem, has never shaken off the epithet of “the Nasty Party” given to it by the aforementioned Mrs May; it is clear to me that it still views the plundering of scarce resources of less economically-welloff nations for the UK’S own financial enrichment as a legitimate strategy – yet again for the procurement of human resources – and history, I hope, will judge them, and those who go along with this latest abuse of power as harshly as the moral majority now views slavery.
Mike Wilson, Longniddry.
NICOLA Sturgeon says excluding social care staff from UK’S new, points-based visa plan would be “devastating”.
What about all the retail and hospitality workers who have been probably more devastated by the huge redundancies in their industry? Surely she could use her jobs quango, Skills Development Scotland, to set up retraining schemes to enable Scottish workers to do these jobs? Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven.