MANCHESTER: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Sunday he would not return to “uncontrolled immigration” to solve fuel, gas and Christmas food crises, suggesting such strains were part of a period of post-Brexit adjustment.
At the start of his Conservative Party’s conference, Johnson was again forced to defend his government against complaints from those unable to get petrol for their cars, retailers warning of Christmas shortages, and gas companies struggling with a spike in wholesale prices.
The British leader had wanted to use the conference to turn the page on more than 18 months of Covid-19 and to refocus on his 2019 election pledges to tackle regional inequality, crime and social care.
Instead, the PM finds himself on the back foot nine months after Britain completed its exit from the European Union.
“The way forward for our country is not to just pull the big lever marked uncontrolled immigration, and let in a huge number of people to work… So what I won’t do is go back to the old, failed model of low wages, low skills supported by uncontrolled immigration,” he said.
“When people voted for change in 2016 and … again in 2019, they voted for the end of a broken model of the UK economy that relied on low wages and low skill and chronic low productivity, and we are moving away from that.” It was the closest the PM has come to admitting that Britain’s exit from the EU had contributed to strains in supply chains and the labour force, stretching everything from fuel deliveries to potential shortages of turkeys for Christmas. — Reuters
Delivery disruptions
While the government plans to issue thousands of temporary visas to foreign truck drivers and poultry workers, Boris Johnson was clear he would not “open the taps of immigration”, again shifting the responsibility to businesses to lift wages and attract more workers. Shortages of workers after Brexit and the Covid pandemic have sown disarray in some sectors of the economy, disrupting deliveries of fuel and medicines.