On immigration

The UK is not full.

Neither is there mass unemployement. In fact there are hundreds of thousands of job vacancies unfilled, and in some fields have been unfilled for over a year.

With the ending of "freedom of movement", or more accurately, freedome of movement of labour meant that hundreds of thousands of EU citizens returned to the EU zone to live and work, thanks to how hard it was to remain here, and quite frankly how unwelcome most were made to feel.

That there are no one to fill the jobs, the jobs remain unfilled and so the taxes also go unpaid, and services and goods those people would have wanted to buy go unbought.

Johnson mused whilst in India last week if the UK could source labour from the sub-continent, which would help, but isn't going to play well with the hard core gammon-faced Brexiteers who see any kind of immigration to be bad.

And the reality is, that although EU migration has dropped off a cliff, non-EU migration has remained pretty constant. So, the immigration the UK could have done something about whilst in the EU, even with the opt-outs it had, the UK has done nothing about, while those from the EU left and never came back.

And that was before COVID, more EU citizens went back, and most have not come back.

Before Christmas we heard about high profile schemes to encourage slaughtermen or HGV drivers to come back to the UK and work for a few months, but nothing on a follow up to how many actually came, which in the case of slaughterment was about 1% of the number of visas offered.

So, jobs unfilled, taxes unpaid, the shortfall is either made up with higher taxes or more cuts to services. And the downward spiral continues.