Labour stores up trouble over its plans to curb immigration

Good morning. You can tell that it’s the parliamentary recess, because the Labour party has made a number of policy announcements (see the FT’s scoop that it would force landowners to sell plots for a fraction of their potential market price in an effort to cut home-building costs in England).

Opposition parties always try to use this time when parliament is not 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.

Power up

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has told the Telegraph that under a Labour government, the government’s migration advisory committee (MAC) would be empowered not just to add jobs and roles to the shortage occupations list, but also to give a timescale 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 the specific time limits — plus a skills spending boost under a Labour government — would incentivise companies to train more British workers. As a result some jobs would vanish from the shortage occupations list, which provides access to visas, and net migration to the UK would fall. She said:

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

This is the big argument at the heart of everything Keir Starmer and Cooper say on immigration: that the UK is a high-immigration country because the country is bad at skilling up its own workforce.

There is a germ of truth here. Take the NHS as an illustrative example. About a third of NHS doctors were trained overseas, and broadly speaking, if the UK trained more medics, the UK would need to attract fewer doctors from abroad. But UK-trained physicians also go on to practice medicine elsewhere.

Ultimately, just as a trained doctor may leave Manchester for London (or vice versa) a skilled professional is always going to have options to move and will, on occasion, take them. Starmer knows that all too well: just look at Arsenal Football Club, for example. Granit Xhaka is a skilled worker and so he’s off to Bayer Leverkusen. Rafaelle Souza is a skilled worker and so she’s off to Orlando Pride. Medical professionals, engineers, and any skilled worker on the UK’s shortage occupations list will always have lots of options and the myth that you can reduce the number of immigrants solely through spending on “skills” is just that, a myth. (Not least because the UK continues to have a tight labour market.)

If you want to get professions such as nursing and medicine off the shortage occupations list you don’t just need to spend more on training. You do also need to be willing to unpack one of the things the NHS has done effectively, which is to hold down clinicians’ salaries relative to the UK’s peer countries.

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

If, as looks likely, the Tories lose the next election they will be free in opposition to embrace restrictionist positions on immigration. Labour’s calculation is that it will have nothing to lose and much to gain by accepting Conservative positions on borders and migration.

But I think the Labour party is storing up trouble for itself. The Conservatives are finding out what happens when you promise the undeliverable on immigration, and a Labour government would, I think, find it much harder to get away with that. Why? Well, in large part because while the Labour party’s internal politics make it difficult for any Labour leader to sharply criticise a Conservative government on migration, let alone to outflank a Tory government on immigration, no Conservative leader faces that kind of pressure.

The Conservatives have managed to go 13 years and counting making impossible promises on migration without losing an election over it. I’m not convinced that the Labour party will be able to go 13 months in office without living to regret their line that investing in skills will lead to meaningful reductions in the number of people coming to work in the UK.

What to do about student debt

My column this week is about the UK’s student loan system, which has real costs both for individual graduates and for society as a whole.

Now try this

I had a lovely long weekend. I really enjoyed Miranda Green’s fun column on grace-and-favour homes, Simon Kuper on the world’s last two superpowers, and Ludovic Hunter-Tilney’s essay on artificial intelligence and the music industry. Speaking of artificial intelligence, our editor, Roula Khalaf, has written a letter about generative AI and the FT, which you can read here.

Top stories today

• Shop price inflation at record high | The cost of shop items rose at an annual rate of 9 per cent last month, up from 8.8 per cent in April, marking the fastest increase since the British Retail Consortium records began in 2005.

• Deadline day for Covid WhatsApps disclosure | The government is locked in a stand-off with the official Covid-19 inquiry as ministers refused to hand over unredacted messages from Boris Johnson, which the inquiry demands to be handed over today. These include Johnson’s diaries and messages with about 40 government figures, including Sunak who was chancellor at the time.

• Increasing NHS staff alone won’t cut it | Creaking infrastructure, a sicker population and a reliance on less experienced staff are hampering the health service’s attempts to treat people in greater numbers than before the pandemic, according to health experts.

• Tony Blair Institute proposes ‘radical’ pensions superfunds | Tens of thousands of public and private sector pension plans would be pooled into “GB superfunds” with assets of up to £500bn each under “extremely radical” proposals to unleash tens of billions for UK business growth.