Almost immediately after the vote to leave the EU I gave a talk to a sector of the hospitality industry. Of about 50 people in the room only one had voted for Brexit; the rest knew it would be immensely damaging to their firms and their industry and have been proved right. So, I asked the one Brexit supporter what she expected to happen and she told me that she would lose many of her staff who were Eastern European but that this was a chance to train up and employ British workers. When I asked her how much she was going to spend on doing that, she told me she couldn’t afford a penny and it was the government’s job to train her new workers.
Moving on 5 years I am sure we are all familiar with the vast, well funded training schemes that the government has poured billions into to train millions of British people to fill the resulting gaps in the jobs market. Thousands of new nurses, builders, doctors, plumbers and of course chefs and bar staff have poured from our colleges and universities with a spring in their step, not.
So what does the government now say to the hospitality industry that is trying to re-open with huge staff shortages “Its up to you to pay more and train British staff to do the work”.
Besides the fact that the Tory party used to pride itself on making things easier for business not harder, this is economic madness. There are not huge swathes of British workers ecstatically happy that at long last they can do some bar shifts on a Bank Holiday weekend and there hasn’t been for decades. Just like the East End no longer empties every summer as thousands throng to the hop fields of Kent, the world has moved on.
From a government that has made a complete dogs dinner of training and apprenticeships for the last ten years this is pretty rich, the damage to state education caused by covid is apparently not serious enough to justify the money necessary to fix it and even back of a fag packet calculations would show that there are not enough British people willing or able to do these jobs.
Brexit trumps economics once again and it is British workers who will suffer.
https://jonty.substack.com/