EVERY TUESDAY
BRITISH JOBS for British workers. It’s a slogan that rings hollow for an employer I know in East Yorkshire.
That’s because she’s sick of taking on staff who turn out to be bone-idle, shiftless layabouts who don’t arrive on time, balk at the idea that getting on involves hard work and commitment, and ring in pretending to be ill when they fancy a day off because they’re hung over.
In fact, she’s become so sick of it that she is now recruiting only migrant workers, principally from Poland, because they put their British counterparts to shame.
They’re punctual, hard-working, enthusiastic and ambitious, can be trusted to get on with the job without constant supervision and have an ideal manner with customers.
She’s not the only business person I know whose low opinion of too many British workers has been coloured by bitter experience.
The owner of a firm in Scarborough told me how dispiriting finding a couple of new staff had proved.
Among the candidates who arrived from the Jobcentre was one who had the effrontery to say he wasn’t interested in the position, and was only there because he’d been told to start applying under threat of his benefits stopping.
What an insult to a man working long hours to make a success of his business, made all the worse for coming from a workshy waster who expects the state to keep him. Others failed to turn up at the appointed time for interview, or were scruffy and inarticulate.
The two jobs on offer went to smart, bright young eastern Europeans who were keen and well-presented. The owner is delighted with them, and the next time he needs staff, he’ll look to employ other foreign workers.
These two business owners don’t know each other. Yet both, in outlining the deficiencies of too many of the British people they interviewed for jobs, reached for the same turn of phrase. “They think the world owes them a living.”
Neither of them can be seen to discriminate against British people, and so are coy about admitting it. But they know the sort of job candidates they prefer, and act accordingly.
Who can blame them? Businesses stand or fall on the quality of the people they employ, and if new arrivals to our country, determined to make their mark, are the best prospects for employers then they deserve to get the jobs.
This is one of the truths about immigration that dare not speak its name – companies large and small have found migrants are often better and more reliable workers than many British people.
That has been tacitly acknowledged across vast swathes of the service sector. Go into any coffee shop, pub, restaurant or hotel, and the chances are you’ll be served by a polite, intelligent young person from eastern Europe.
There hasn’t been any hidden conspiracy to push a pro-EU agenda in this or any positive discrimination towards migrants – it is simply that foreign workers have sought jobs when British people couldn’t be bothered.
The flip side can be seen in any town or city in the shape of the young men and women of working age hanging about aimlessly who might as well wear badges reading “benefits scrounger”.
It isn’t a matter of can’t work. It’s one of won’t work, and the reason why successive governments have attempted to reform the benefits system.
If anybody doubts the need for foreign workers to drive large parts of the economy, they should look to agriculture which, in some parts of the country, is reliant on them because British people simply refuse to do the jobs because they are too much like hard work.
Loose talk about immigrants taking British jobs ignores this. Businesses know it, but don’t like to say so for fear of alienating customers.
It’s delusional to suppose that if the door was slammed on all incomers to Britain, an army of people would miraculously arise from the ranks of those on benefits and be transformed into an industrious workforce.
The dismay expressed by employers and trade organisations last week, when the draft of proposed restrictions on immigration drawn up by the Home Office at the instruction of the Prime Minister was leaked, illustrated that the worth of foreign workers is appreciated much more widely than at a couple of vigorous independent businesses in North and East Yorkshire.
Questions about how many people should be allowed to come to Britain have been ignored or glossed over by all the main political parties for decades. That is why the issue blew up in the faces of Government and Opposition alike in the Brexit referendum.
There has been much in the current immigration debate that has been sensible and needed airing, but until we face up to realities about willingness to work and what employers are looking for, the discussion won’t achieve anything.