Labor racks up trouble for its plans to curb immigration

Good morning. It is understandable that it is the parliamentary interruption, because the Labor party has made a series of political announcements (see the FT scoop according to which it would force landowners to sell land for a fraction their potential market price in an attempt to reduce the cost of building houses in England).

Opposition parties always try to use this moment when parliament isn’t sitting to make noise, because they are less likely to be drowned out by whatever the government is doing. Some thoughts on one of those announcements in today’s note.

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Shadow Secretary Yvette Cooper he told the Telegraph that under a Labor governmentthe government’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) would be empowered not only to add jobs and roles to the shortage list, but also to provide a timetable for how long these positions should remain on the list.

Cooper’s argument is that some of these jobs reveal a failure to invest in skills and that specific time constraints – plus increased spending on skills under a Labor government – would incentivize firms to train more British workers. As a result, some jobs would disappear from the shortage list, which provides access to visas, and net migration to the UK would decrease. She said:

“There may be some occupations where you talk about really rare international skills where there may always be a need for overseas recruitment, but there may be other areas where it’s actually a lack of training here in the UK and it shouldn’t be on the list of shortage occupations”.

This is the big argument at the heart of all things Keir Starmer and Cooper say about immigration: that the UK is a high immigration country because the country is unable to train its workforce.

There is a grain of truth here. Take the NHS as an illustrative example. From a third of NHS doctors have been trained overseas, and in general, if the UK trained more doctors, the UK would have to attract fewer doctors from overseas. But UK-trained doctors continue to practice medicine elsewhere as well.

Ultimately, just as a qualified doctor may leave Manchester for London (or vice versa), a qualified professional will always have options for relocation, and sometimes will take them. Starmer knows this all too well – just look at Arsenal Football Club, for example. Granit Xhaka is a skilled worker and therefore leaves for Bayer Leverkusen. Rafaelle Souza is a skilled worker and therefore leaves for the Orlando Pride. Medical professionals, engineers and any skilled worker on the UK shortage list will always have plenty of options and the myth that you can reduce the number of immigrants just by spending on ‘skills’ is just that, a myth. (Also because the UK continues to have a tight job market.)

If you want to eliminate professions like nursing and medicine from your shortage list, you don’t just need to spend more on training. You also have to be willing to unpack one of the things the NHS has done effectively, which is keep doctors’ salaries low compared to their UK counterparts.

All of this costs money; the reason successive Conservative governments have talked about a big game on immigration but the numbers have remained high is the reluctance to spend that money to cut immigration.

If, as seems likely, the Conservatives lose the next election, they will be free to oppose restrictive positions on immigration. Labor’s reckoning is that it will have nothing to lose and much to gain by accepting Conservative positions on borders and migration.

But I think the Labor Party is packing trouble for itself. The Conservatives are finding out what happens when you promise something undeliverable on immigration, and a Labor government, I think, would find it much harder to get away with. Why? Well, largely because while internal Labor Party politics make it difficult for any Labor leader to sharply criticize a Conservative immigration government, let alone outflank a Conservative immigration government, no Conservative leader faces that kind of pressure.

The Conservatives have managed to make impossible promises on migration for 13 years and counting without losing an election for it. I am not convinced that the Labor Party will be able to stay in office for 13 months without regretting its view that investment in skills will lead to significant reductions in the number of people coming to work in the UK.

What to do with student debt

My column this week is on the UK student loan systemwhich has real costs to both individual graduates and to society as a whole.

Now try this

I had a nice long weekend. I loved Miranda Green’s humorous column on houses of grace and favourSimon Kuper on tThe last two superpowers of the worldand Ludovic Hunter-Tilney’s essay on artificial intelligence and the music industry. Speaking of AI, our editor, Roula Khalaf, wrote a letter on Generative AI and FT, which you can read here.

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