Barry Gardiner, MP for Brent North, made a very long speech in the Brexit debate yesterday. The full speech is HERE but I thought people in Brent would be particulalrly interested in what he had to say about immigration:
I move on to immigration, which was a key part of the
referendum debate. Like many Members, I was outraged by the dog-whistle
politics of the Vote Leave campaign’s very own “Project
Fear”: that millions of Turkish citizens would be queueing up for
entry into the UK. That was a lie, and those Members who associated themselves
with that campaign should feel ashamed.
I also want to express my disgust at those who have sought
to paint leave voters as ignorant racists; it is that sort of demonisation of
our fellow citizens that is so damaging to the discourse around Brexit. It
precisely obscures some of the real concerns that leave voters did express, and
had every right to. Their concerns were about the lack of housing, the strains
on the NHS,
and being undercut in the workplace by unscrupulous employers who often exploited
migrants and paid them less than the minimum wage. All those issues are about
public services and domestic enforcement. They will not be solved by our
leaving the EU, but they will also not be solved by our remaining. What is
needed is a change of Government policy, or, better still, a change of
Government.
Immigration is a vital element of our economic growth, and
of our trade and trade negotiations. We need migration. The Government’s own
economic assessment shows that European migration contributes 2% of GDP
to the UK. The Government’s proposed £30,000 salary threshold would actually
preclude three quarters of EU migrants. I am not referring simply to seasonal
agricultural workers or careworkers; even some junior doctors do not earn more
than £30,000 a year. The Government’s supposed skills threshold is really a
salary threshold, and it would do serious damage to our economy.
The irony is, of course, that EU net migration is coming
down. Statistics published just last month record the number as 74,000. The
Government have been complaining that free movement gives them no control over
those people. Presumably they mean the sort of control that they have always
been able to exercise over migrants coming from the rest of the world. Is it
not strange, then, that the figure recorded for net migration from the rest of
the world is 248,000?
This is why politicians are not trusted. They tell people
that we need to abolish freedom of movement to bring migration down to the tens
of thousands when our own rules, over which the EU has never had any say, are
allowing three times that number. What we should be explaining to people is
that net migration should go both up and down in line with the needs of our
economy. As long as we have fair rules and competent and reasonable management
of migration, this country will be better off. The trouble is that we have had
lies, arbitrary targets that bear no relation to our economy’s requirements,
and, frankly, administrative incompetence.
As with regulatory alignment, so with the exchange of
people. The deeper the trade deal we want, the greater the need for an exchange
of people. Foreign companies that invest in the UK want and need their
indigenous workers to get visas, and the harder we make that process, the less
investment we will secure. When the Prime Minister went to India two years ago to secure
a trade deal, she was rebuffed on precisely that issue. The Times
of India summed it up on its front page with the headline “You want our
business. But you do not want our People”.
…Students
should never have been part of our net migration figures, and immigration
should be proclaimed loudly by every Member to be an important and hugely
beneficial resource for our economy. Yes, free movement of people will end when
we leave the EU, because it is a function of the treaties of the EU, but that
does not mean that we should not operate a system of immigration controls with
the EU that allows broad and reciprocal access to all our citizens in a way
that maximises the benefits to all our economies. That is what our businesses
need: access to skills.
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