How brexit is turning the UK into a haven…for human rights abuse

One of the main motivations for brexit was to tackle immigration. However, even before the referendum, it was pointed out to the brexiters, that their plans would be unworkable and counter productive. Job markets are fairly complicated and restricting migrant can led to labour shortages, slowing down economic growth, which can reduce the number of jobs available to locals. There would, for example, be little benefit in being able to catch more fish in UK waters. As the bulk of the UK’s fishing quota’s are held by a handful of very wealthy families. And the UK lacks the fishermen to crew these extra boats. Plus, without single market membership, no European market to export the fish into (while equally making it harder to import in the fish types the British prefer to eat).

The only way these worker shortages could be avoided would be by using agencies to bring in workers from beyond the EU. Which would A) defeat the supposed purpose of brexit. B) still be insufficient to meet demand (given the shear volume of seasonal workers required), meaning crops rotting in the field. And C) threaten the jobs of UK workers (because you can’t half run a business, if they can’t hire the staff in the UK, they’ll shut down and move somewhere else). In short, the warning was, brexit will have the completely opposite effect intended and likely decrease the number of jobs, while leaving some industries even more dependant on migrant labour.

And now post brexit, what do you know, we’re hearing stories of migrants (mostly from Africa and Asia) being brought in to crew fishing boats. Many of whom are reporting dangerously long working hours, violence & physical abuse, not to mention being paid below the minimum wage (thanks to a loophole, similar to the one P&O used to sack all of their UK staff recently).

Meanwhile its a crucial year for farming. Last year was a bit of a washout, due to a lack of farm workers and this year is expected to be worse (with it more important that harvests go off ok, given the conflict in Ukraine). So agencies are being used to bring in farm workers from all over the world. And again, we hear stories of exploitation and abuse, as the workers (and some of the farmers) are at the mercy of corrupt agencies and unscrupulous gang masters.

Even in a well paid profession like nursing, migrants are finding themselves locked into exploitative contracts with expensive exit fees. In short, there is an increasing risk of the UK becoming the Dubai of Europe (where migrant workers are essentially treated as slaves). Yes, the UK, which prides itself on being some sort of a beacon for human rights…yet is planning to deport refugees to Rwanda…and letting in less Ukrainian refugees than Ireland….I think we’d best just leave it at that!

None of this should come as a surprise. The whole reason why the EU has promoted freedom of movement as one of its core principles, isn’t because its run by a bunch of leftie liberal hippies (actually its generally run by centre right politicians). Instead its down to more pragmatic economic considerations. You are going to get situations where there are labour shortages in one place and a lack of jobs somewhere else. E.g. back in the 80’s there was a building boom in Germany, while business was slack in the UK (meaning lots of UK builders moved over to Germany), with the reverse happening in the 2000’s.

A lot of jobs often see seasonal fluctuations in demand. For example, the planting and harvest seasons for different crops are often relatively short windows of time, but these vary across the continent depending on the type of crop and climate. Meaning a group of migrant workers can move from one region to another and help fill job vacancies. Something which workers tied to one country can’t do (particularly in a highly urbanised country like the UK, which has few agricultural workers and poor public transport in rural areas).

Then there is the specialist nature of many modern jobs. For example, the Tories want to solve their energy problems through a combination of heat pumps, nuclear and fracking. Well, ignoring the practical difficulties in this strategy, the more immediate show stopper is going to be a lack of people with the right technical skills to work in these industries. For example, I was considering a heat pump when I replaced my boiler a few years ago and finding a reliable installer (who could get back to me quickly, as I had no hot water or heating) was one of the reasons I ruled this out.

And if you are worried about migrants competing against locals for jobs, well that can be solved by providing them with legal protections (also something the EU was keen to push) and a higher minimum wage. Thus an employer who doesn’t look after their staff, they’ll quit (or go on strike) and possibly report him or sue (so he gets a fine and loses his work force).

Obviously, if you bypass these rules, as the UK is now doing, you raise the risk of workers being exploited and underpaid. And these migrants are less likely to report this, particularly if they are here illegally, as they will fear the authorities will deport them. And this ridiculous Rwanda deportation policy makes things worse, as it means gang masters can now use the threat of being shipped off to Rwanda to control their staff.

And if employers can hire someone for less than the minimum wage and work them like galley slaves, well pretty soon they will stop hiring British workers at all. This is exactly what’s happened in other countries with strict immigration rules. Certain industries in America, most notably meat packing, are mostly staffed by migrant workers from overseas. Meaning what was until a few decades ago a decent, well paid job, now it resembles something akin to Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle of the 1900’s. Similarly in the Gulf states you will find few if any locals on a building site, despite massive levels of unemployment. Because who in their right mind would hire an Arab to do a job, when they can get a Pakistani to do it for peanuts (plus they could get in trouble if a local got injured or killed on the job).

It seems the brexiters, like so many populists, are having to learn the hard way why the rules they hate were enacted in the first place. Why did the EU single market come about? Because borders suck. You have to queue for hours or even days (a disaster relief charity has now been drafted in to help out UK truck drivers stuck at Dover), fill out lots of paperwork, etc. And borders tend to become a haven for smuggling and criminality. So it made sense to reach an agreement across the EU allowing them to be done away with. And thus it is no surprise that when the UK leaves the single market, you get brexiters complaining about having to queue for hours (or days!) and filling out lots of paperwork.

Similarly many libertarians complain about how national currencies are under the control of the big bad gov’mint, who put in place all sorts of rules and regulations. Not to mention the gov’mint can just print money. So they set up their own private crypto currencies to act as a form of digital gold standard. The thing is, we’ve tried this model of private currencies before and suffice to say there’s a reason there aren’t any around anymore. They proved to be unstable, at risk of fraud, often resulting in economic crashes and market panics. This is the whole reason why many governments set up national currencies in the first place. As for the gold standard, that created more problems than it solved. Hence why Nixon (a republican) decided to get rid of it.

But unfortunately, libertarians are poor students of history. And so we’ve now seen multiple examples of the very same problems emerge with crypto, including scams and outright fraud, the sudden collapses of entire currencies and market panics (imagine being paid in bitcoin and because of some tweet from Elon, your salary loses 25% of its value before you get to spend a penny). The only difference is, these crashes are occurring on a much larger scale and impacting far more people. Plus crypto is also helping criminals (or rogue states like North Korea) launder their money. As well as providing a nice new revenue stream by rug pulling millennial’s. And similarly NFT’s have proven to be little more than a repeat of tulip mania….only at least the investors back then got a few nice flowers out of it!

As the saying goes history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes. So before you start complaining about some law, or regulation, or asking why don’t we do things a different way instead. It might be a good idea to go look up why this law was put in place in the first place.