Firstly, this is a subsidy for employing British workers funded by a tax on employing migrants. Reform is trying to change employer behaviour through the tax system, making it more attractive to recruit UK citizens and less attractive to recruit people from overseas. This policy is blatantly racist
As the policy would apply to a Good Dane just as much as it would to a Bad Somali (insert group and description as you wish) it is not racist. It is citizenist, true, but that’s both a different thing and quite possibly a good thing.
The consequences would be profound.
Farming would probably cease in the UK.
So would UK food production.
Unconvinced, to be honest about it.
Firstly, this is a subsidy for employing British workers funded by a tax on employing migrants. Reform is trying to change employer behaviour through the tax system, making it more attractive to recruit UK citizens and less attractive to recruit people from overseas. This policy is blatantly racist
As Tim says – it assumes no migrants are White? And normally he is the first to want to tax businesses out of existence so it’s ultimately the height of hypocrisy for him – the man whose magnum opus is called ‘The Joy of Tax’ to criticse people who use tax to achieve a political goal.
Secondly, the policy is deliberately aimed at sectors that rely heavily on lower-paid migrant labour. Hospitality, agriculture, food processing, social care and similar sectors would face the greatest increase in costs. The viability of a great many companies in this sector would be in doubt. If the NHS were subject to this charge, massive cuts in its services would be required if its budget were not increased to cover the cost.
Interesting – so exploitation of migrant Labour is absolutely fine if its done for a noble purpose? Ultimately longer term such a policy isn’t sustainable so at some point you have to grasp the nettle
By contrast, banks, universities, technology companies and multinational businesses recruiting highly paid overseas staff would be relatively unaffected. This, then, is a policy that is not only racist but also elitist.
They’re still going to be penalized if they recruit overseas. Certainly if combined with a reduction in the costs imposed by the current government I can see it causing companies to consider domestic recruitment as preferable even for more senior roles.
Thirdly, the policy assumes that unemployed UK citizens can readily replace migrant workers. That is a very large assumption. Many employers argue that vacancies already exist because suitably skilled or willing domestic labour is not available in the places and occupations where demand exists.
Believing that UK workers are suddenly going to become keen to take on the work with antisocial hours, or challenging roles, that many migrant workers now undertake in the UK economy as a consequence of this tax change, is an exercise in fantastic thinking, in the sense that it does not reflect reality, and that it is not going to happen.
Hold on – isn’t that the entire basis for your ‘politics of care’ and the ‘Green New Deal’ – there’s dozens of ‘shovel ready initiatives’ to which natives’ hands could be turned if the circumstances were propitious? Or is that only on Tuesday and only under your auspices?
Fourthly, Reform is explicitly seeking to force economic adjustment. The argument is that if employers cannot access migrant labour, they will invest in training, automation and productivity improvements instead. Whether this happens in practice is another matter. Some firms might invest, but others might simply shrink, relocate or close.
And if anyone can tell me what these adjustments might be in social care, I am keen to know. Does Jnrick know someone who has created a bottom-wiping machine?
Come to that, is the coffee shop experience now to become, make your own out of a machine? My suspicion is Jenrick has no clue what he is talking about.
All of which objections were raised against your ludicrous ‘Taxing Wealth’ Report but which were seen then as being ‘economically incoherent?
There’s plenty more in the same vein but overall the post seems to be , I am surmising ,cobbled together, probably by Gemini. He can’t even be bothered to write his own material any more.
Say what now? Spud is now against government interference in the economy?
Apparently bottom-wiping and coffee-making are tasks beyond the millions of people languishing on benefits.
Mind you, we mock Spud for believing that importing foreign labour while paying natives (and now of course millions of foreigners) not to work is the way forward, but substantial numbers of middle-class allegedly educated lefties believe exactly the same.
“Come to that, is the coffee shop experience now to become, make your own out of a machine?”
I’ve encountered pretty good coffee machines at hotel breakfast bars that produce decent fresh ground coffee at the push of a button so why not?
And in ‘Spoon’s…
The coffee at Spoons (and some other observations) makes me think that Tim Martin or someone working for him is a bit of a business genius.
It’s some daft amount of money, like £1.20 for unlimited coffee. But the trick to such a bargain is removing nearly all the labour.
The “per cup” cost for coffee is fuck all. Beans, hot water, milk and sugar. It’s about 15p, if that. You’re paying to heat and light the pub anyway, You’re buying a coffee machine anyway. Do you want an empty table, or do you want to make 50p from it? And I reckon the real money maker is that someone who comes in and works on their laptop buys lunch. Like cinemas make their money from popcorn.
But also, breakfast. Why don’t more pubs serve breakfast like spoons? You’ve paid for a pub, paid for a kitchen, paid for crockery and cutlery. It’s food and someone to cook it. Go into a spoons and there aren’t huge numbers of breakfast customers but it clearly adds up.
“pretty good coffee machines at hotel breakfast bars”
Aye, but then Murphy couldn’t write about how impressed the server in his local coffeshop was at the great insights into tax and economics that Murphy gave him.
Coffee machines (even ones with beans) are very variable. I got a monthly free coffee for a year from Greggs with something (car insurance?), and I won’t bother claiming the other 11.
Mind you, the quality in some coffeeshops is pretty dreadful too.
The biggest variation is beans. Caffe Nero are about the best chain because they spend more. Greggs do an OK cappucino.
McDonalds coffee is really good for the price. Not the best coffee but good, and costs sod all.
Today is Tuesday. The esteemed professor really doesn’t know his sphincter from his articulatio cubiti.
Murphy “assumes no migrants are White” – indeed. But he also assumes no citizens are non-White. I don’t really think that’s the case any more.
The viability of a great many companies in this sector would be in doubt.
To paraphrase Heinlein: Any business that relies on slave labour for its existence deserves to die.
TTK and Rachel Thieves are probably kicking themselves that they didn’t think of that! They’ve tried everything else to put farmers out of business.
“Farming would probably cease in the UK.”
A lot of it should.
“So would UK food production.”
Doubtful. The likes of Iceland already do a lot abroad. Frozen stuff etc. but you can’t do that with M&S sandwiches.
Is there anything more dismal than a M&S sandwich?
A Boots sandwich?
The sandwiches from the vibrant corner shop?
Nothing can top a sarnie as sold by BR’s Travellers Fare. I remember buying a ham and tomato sandwich from Fenchurch St in 1976. Cut diagonally, it appeared to have two slices of ham and four slices of tomato . On closer inspection there was one full slice of ham with a thin sliver an inch wide laid on the diagonal, so when cut made it look like you were getting two slices, and they’d done the same with the tomato.
Ah, nationalisation. Imagine what it would do to a supermarket.
I recall a ham sandwich bought from the NAAFI on RAF Gan; the single slice of meat was so thin it looked like somebody had cut out a picture of a ham slice from a newspaper.
Did you pay for it with a picture of a pound note?
,
I once went to Buellton California, a town whose claim to fame was the railway refreshments building transplanted wholly brick by brick from Liverpool Street station in London. The curly sandwiches were reproduced perfectly, unless they were the same ones.
British Rail sandwiches? Something we appear to be bringing back…
Good luck with that.
They might have gotten away with it in the 1970s, when you didn’t know what was near a station, but everyone has Google Maps now. I never spend money getting gouged at a station. I can find a supermarket, takeaway, wine shop on the way to the train.
There is a fair bit of UK food production happening in my garden at the moment. Obviously not enough to live on but I’m working on it.
AI and humanoid robots will displace a lot of workers. We really need to discourage immigrant workers coming here as “workers” then rapidly becoming unemployment benefit recipients.
We also really really need to discourage immigrants coming here as deliberate unemployment benefit recipients.
The Danish government did a study in 2018 and found that migrants from North Africa, the middle east and Turkey cost the taxpayer just under £10,000 each every year. God knows what the boat people are costing us………….
What good value. Can we swap them for some of our citizens? Our lot seem to have cost us four times that. Our nation debt is now £2.9 T which works out a bit over £42,000 each
I urge you not to listen to the cretinous columnists with a boner for this stuff. AI just isn’t reliable enough. It’ll fuck up so many sandwiches, you’ll spend more money fixing them.
Same as how all these “self driving” cars have humans monitoring them. Not entirely Mechanical Turk, but quite a bit.
My own personal experience is that what you get out of AI is way better than 80% of people. It’s not perfect but what is. Half of the workforce produce little of value so it’s a low bar. Something that is good at pattern matching and predicting what comes next is often all you need.
There are plenty of firms out there starting to shed a lot of workers.
I also know of firms developing software where everything they do is based around AI, and they are doing well. Interestingly new hires there often express surprise that the AI there performs so much better than where they used to work.
Self driving cars are out there. Waymo has about 3000 with only 70 people monitoring them. China seems to have very many more autonomous vehicles.
So unlike you, I see a bright future for AI and I’m certainly not going to get rid of my investment in it. In fact Im growing it as I see AI as the huge enabler for humanoid robots.
Your views are very different so we will have to agree to differ on this one.
Note however, I do see one heck of a social problem coming.
It’s a bad policy proposal though. Foreign workers already get taxed more than natives, effectively taxed I mean, ‘cos cost of work permits and that ghastly NHS surcharge.
I think the Brits are overwhelmingly tolerant of foreign workers and they would be respected even more if those foreigners who came to the UK to claim bennies, marry cousins, or in boats from france were not here.
Is it? And, so what?
Brits might be overwhelmingly tolerant of foreign workers, but they should not be*, as foreign workers suppress wages and are one side of the destructive immigration/benefits complex.
Employing foreigners should be made more expensive and benefits should be reduced.
*I do not mean they ought to stone foreign NHS workers, but they should not tolerate the system which prevents more UK doctors and nurses being trained and which allows millions to stay idle when there is coffee to be poured and arses to be wiped.
Foreign workers with visas stamped ‘No Recourse To Public Funds’ are going to struggle to be part of the immigration/benefits complex.
If you know of any please report them.
I should add that it’s the UK’s own benefits complex, allied with the socialist NHS industrial complex that is problematic, not the immigrant workers paying more than UK workers to be employed here. Imv of course.
If you want a grant of citizenship to be devolved to parishes like in Switzerland then I’m right with you, but I’m always going to rate immigrant workers above the dinghy squadrons and cousin lengthers.
We don’t want foreign workers.
We do want the CBI to scream like the Devil when we take away their “high-skilled” labour (toilet cleaners from Zimbabwe whose entire extended families come with them).
A good start by Reform, but they also need to come down like a ton of bricks on the cancer that is offshoring. If British companies want to sack UK staff and hire Indians, we should make their taxes hell.
Just make it illegal to export British people’s data to any third country with poor data security.
I’m making a list…
Every single “trade deal” India signs is actually a one-way mass migration deal. The Indians can’t build great companies or products on their own, but are very ruthless practicioners of ethnic nepotism and racist hiring practices. If you’re a white guy and your new boss is Indian, better update that CV, lol.
Jeets have nearly completed their colonisation of Silicon Valley, and they’re rapidly taking over Canada. But why should we allow Indians to come and take what we’ve built? The “trade deal” with India needs to be cancelled, and their elite human capital immediately returned. I don’t need a 45 year old Calcutta native speaking thickly accented broken English to serve me a cup of coffee at 4am in a McDonald’s in Wales. There’s plenty of local people speaking thickly accented broken English on the dole who should be doing those jobs.
And maybe one day we’ll get a desktop operating system that isn’t garbage.
Chinese girl I know in HK works for one of the global banks as part of a small team (only four or five people). A couple of years ago they brought in an Indian as the team’s manager. She is now the only local and only woman left on the team and they are constantly trying to undermine her.
I have a mate who has to work with a load of outsourced staff in India and he has so many stories of uselessness and mendacity. A recent one was a team in India which was meant to support the UK and was paid extra to work UK hours. Turns out they’d all been fucking off at normal India time ie just after lunch UK time.
“I have a mate who has to work with a load of outsourced staff in India and he has so many stories of uselessness and mendacity. A recent one was a team in India which was meant to support the UK and was paid extra to work UK hours. Turns out they’d all been fucking off at normal India time ie just after lunch UK time.”
The problem in a lot of large businesses is that you’ve got so many layers of management, so much distance from top to bottom that the people at the top know fuck all. They will hire cheap Jeets because they’re cheaper per hour, which is just not a way to hire software people.
In a 500 man company, the CEO at least knows the lowest level of management.
And a lot of these huge businesses are run by overpaid bureaucrats. The founder left. The guy with the vision and the dream. If you’re lucky they picked a good successor, but by the time you get to the 3rd or 4th person, the effect is gone. They’re often bluffers and bullshitters. And they get slaughtered by some new young guys that can run lean. Go and watch Toho’s Godzilla Minus One ($13m) and compare it to Disney’s The Marvels ($374m).
40 years ago, I worked for a life assurer with 2000 staff that had been established for 150 years – the CEO prided himself on knowing all the staff by name (though I think he may have been provided with a cheat sheet when he visited some of the more remote branches).
The number of work places I’ve been told of where they had to stop putting snacks in the break room because the brown folks take them home. You see, it isn’t bad behaviour in the eyes of those people, it’s SOP.
You also see it among Sri Lankans, Malays, Bruneians.
I’m all for Panjeet competing with me. What Britain really needs to do is to make work pay, make business pay. Tax according to land values and encourage people to start businesses in the cheap places.
Maybe you can’t collect much tax from a factory in Wales, so don’t. But it’s good having a factory there. There’s not much else to do with the place.
You actually beleive that all the foreigners here actually pay to use NHS services?
You actually believe that
allany of the foreigners here actually pay to use NHS services?FTFY
Wait a moment… The very Potato who, on a daily basis, promotes Taxation as a “motivator” for economic behaviour, objects to Taxation as a motivator when someone he doesn’t like uses the concept…
How deliciously hypocritical. Just when you think the man’s lack of self-awareness has reached rock bottom…. he digs the hole deeper…
“I suppose we should no longer be surprised by this, but I still am, and my shock that people would wish to use the UK state to prejudice people’s well-being remains quite profound.”
Whut?
This from the cvnt who wants to tax almost everyone to buggery in order to fund the workshy, the bloodsucking public sector and the surgeons and engineers who rock up on the south coast.
I do hope Reform’s proposals for additional taxes on foreigners also includes those who, while being Brits, also hold Irish passports.
Dual nationality should be abolished. They can be British or foreign, not both
This is the all important golden carrot:
in order to reduce the National Insurance (NI) paid by employers on their British staff,
As anybody involved in British business knows, since Legohead Reeves turbofucked us with National Insurance.
Before Labour, the job market was tentatively optimistic. We were still hiring in the UK. General sentiment wasn’t great, but ok. Treading water, after the COVID lockdown inflation shocks and the Boriswave “wtf am I getting 400 applications from Nigerians in Newcastle?” supply shock. But still, companies were hiring.
The NI hike completely shafted all that. Sudden belt tightening all round. Graduate scheme gutted. More jobs exported to India, to be cheaply done by incompetent people who make expensive mistakes. Another year of below inflation pay rises for the survivors. It’s grim. We need to bring the cost of everything down, including employment and energy, if we don’t want to end up dead in a tent.
Its not a subsidy though, is it.
Theres no money if you employ one.
After getting the basic premise wrong it can only get worse from there
“Okay, Chief, let me see if I’ve got this straight.”
“If you hire a migrant, the government will charge you a tax. Isn’t it the government’s job to keep migrants out? If you have a man identified as migrant, why not just send ICE to take him away?”
Firstly, this is a subsidy for employing British workers funded by a tax on employing migrants. Reform is trying to change employer behaviour through the tax system, making it more attractive to recruit UK citizens and less attractive to recruit people from overseas.
Stop, you don’t need to keep convincing me.
Would a “racist migration policy” have stopped 250,000 British girls being raped, with the collusion of the British police?
Yep.
Anti-racists are the baddies,
HansCharles.Here’s what happened to a little girl named Chloe, because greedy British employers cried about a “skills shortage”. Does Labour include rape in the GDP statistics?
Chloe told the police she was being raped by Asian men. The police called her a prostitute.
Chloe was impregnated by one of her rapists, forced to convert to Islam (the religion of peace, so admired by Sir Keir and King Charles), and then beaten on a daily basis
Some Muslims speak freely about what they think of you white people who pay for their benefits: