Labor’s immigration curb has obvious costs to pay for public sphere

Good morning. Well, at least no one pretends that Labour’s number one priority is to grow. Some ideas about the government’s plans to reduce immigration to the UK below are a little longer (see here for the FT breakdown of the contents of the white paper).

Nursing shortage

Keir Starmer said the damage caused by immigration to the UK was “immeasurable”. (This is what politicians mean when they use “we ask the government to mechanically tangle the numbers, we don’t like the answers”. Almost everything in public policy is calculating.) Without change, Britain would risk becoming a “stranger island”, he said. The Prime Minister doesn’t believe this, here’s a chart that proves it:

I’m going to go out here and say the difference between “immeasurable damage” and “everything is clumsy” is not “We’re going to have 88,000 people attending each year with skilled workers’ visas, and now we’re going to have 49,000 people”. We didn’t even talk about the changes needed to turn us into a nodded island of acquaintances.

But what we may be talking about is changing us from a country without a care industry to a country without a single country. I think the government has canceled the existing nursing staff visa. This is not a well-designed visa route, in large part because the original sin attempted to design a visa route for workers with a large number of paper-qualified workers to fill the labor shortage in low-paying, high-security industries. (It’s worth reading this article by Delphine Strauss in 2023 to learn about the social care visa route.)

But, despite this, the UK does yes In an aging society, its dependency ratio is growing, we do have labor shortages, not labor errors. If you cancel your social care visa and leave nothing behind, you will have trouble when the government ends up getting involved in most social care expenses that have to raise taxes.

As readers know, I am a long-time believer, and the government just needs to keep its promise and provide public services at the level expected by the British people, just increase taxes.

But I will be blunt here: I think if the money goes into the social care sector to a large extent, the UK government will not be able to strongly oppose the political opposition from increasing taxes.

There are already various plans to address the sick social care sector in the UK. In 2010, Andy Burnham proposed the idea of ​​levied 10% on all estates by paying social care (the so-called “death tax”) with inheritance tax. In 2017, there was Theresa May’s Dementia Tax that required seniors who received social care to fund the full cost until they reached the last £100,000 that the state would allow them to retain.

One reason these plans were withdrawn is that at any given time, most people have not experienced a nursing crisis. We are experiencing one of these results: by managing the resources and time of our local government. But, for the most part, we have not linked our growing council tax laws to the social care crisis.

More importantly, while we have a lot of evidence that people don’t like abstract net immigration numbers, we absolutely have no evidence (which is indeed good collateral to the opposite) that anyone is truly willing to encounter higher inflation or lower in their public service standards. Indeed, as ipsos’ astonishing investigation of the campaign board this month shows, the leaps and bounds here are not “who thinks we are becoming a stranger island” or who faces rising real estate prices. It is precisely who’s falling standards in their public sphere:

Of course, if, like the Labor government, your solution to many political problems is to find new obstacles and new burdens to accumulate businesses, this will become increasingly difficult to solve.

Try it now

I’ve mostly heard of Caroline Shaw taproot Write my column this week.

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