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Conservatives prepare to drop rigid immigration cap
Business Digest: Tories could drop popular election policy amid fears it could threaten UK plc’s competitiveness
Britain's coalition government is preparing to drop - or radically alter
- the Conservative party's promise to introduce a cap on immigration, because of fears it could harm businesses. The policy to reduce the number of non-European Union migrant workers entering the country was one of the Tories' more popular policies during the recent General Election.
But the Home Secretary, Theresa May, is to launch a consultation on the plans next week, promising to take on board the concerns of the City and employers. Education secretary Michael Gove and universities secretary David Willets are among senior Tories who have warned that a rigid cap on immigration could harm UK business by preventing the recruitment of top talent.
Solutions that could make an immigration cap more flexible are thought to include varying the limits for certain professions and allowing companies to bid for work visas every quarter rather than once a year.
"We lost thousands of votes to the Tories because of this policy - it was very popular," a Lib Dem insider told the Financial Times. "It's rather ironic to hear some of them criticising it now for exactly the same reasons we criticised it during the election."
Read a full report at the Financial Times (registration required). ·
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No cap on immigration? The truth gets out eventually. The fact is, we cannot control immigration by quota as we are part of the EU. EU countries produce floods of immigrants, and there is nothing we can do about it as UK plc because policy is set in Brussels and Strasbourg, where the puppet parliaments sit and do the bidding of the grey suited bureaucrats of the Commission - who are not elected, so you can never vote against them to get rid of them. And of course if the denizens of Africa or Asia can get to mainland Europe and lose their papers, they can then go on to get into Britain, the soft touch of the EU. Does it take a genius to work out that any discussions of caps and quotas is a voter con for election time? Can we do anything about it, apart from leave the EU? NO!
This seems like an outbreak of common sense. The UK has always relied on being able to import workers with skills that are in demand. The NHS and schools in particular rely on this and would be in big trouble without it. Of course there are people, particularly from other EU countries, who arrive here without even the ability to speak English or therefore to hold down a job. Just like all the numpties from Britain who move themselves to Spain and France every year and then wonder why they are broke and jobless.