Food shortages have little to do with Brexit - they can be solved through our new immigration system

 The end of freedom of movement is forcing us to think properly about immigration policy. That's a rather good thing

Source - Daily Telegraph 25/08/21

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Britain is preparing itself for yet another bout of panic-buying as supermarket shoppers hoard supplies of goods they fear will be in short supply in the months ahead. Even McDonald’s has run out of milkshakes, thanks to the shortage of HGV drivers.

It’s all the fault of Brexit, according to those still not resigned to our new post-EU reality. And speaking as someone who campaigned for Vote Leave, I accept they have a point. But not a particularly powerful one.

It is obviously true that by ending freedom of movement, which was a mandatory part of being an EU member, immigration to the UK has dropped. And among those numbers of people no longer arriving to live and work here are individuals on whose labour we previously depended, including lorry drivers.

The logic deployed by people with “FBPE” (follow back, pro-Europe) in their Twitter profiles goes thus: freedom of movement maintained a large supply of cheap labour to Britain; the only way to restore that cheap labour, therefore, is to rejoin the EU and revive freedom of movement.

A load of tosh, obviously. Any country in the world, including Britain, is free to open its doors at any point to anyone and everyone from around the globe. Freedom of movement is not the intellectual property of the European Union, just an imposition (and not always a popular one, even for those existing member states) that comes as a condition of being in the club. We do not have to be in the EU in order to welcome low-skilled labour into the country.

What the pro-EU critics seem to be saying is that when we had no choice as to whether to accept freedom of movement, everything was fine. But now that we have the power to control immigration, that is in itself morally reprehensible. Even if the government decided to adopt freedom of movement with open arms and replicate the system that prevailed before we left the EU, those critics would still not be happy because the system would not have the EU flag embossed upon it.

Even if we do not return to full-throated freedom of movement (and we won’t), ministers can (and probably will) relax existing rules to attract more lorry drivers, just as they have done for other key industries. There’s nothing like the screams of outrage from anguished shoppers to get the attention of electorally-sensitive politicians.

That would be one way of solving the problem. Another way would be to stand by and allow the supermarkets to be subject to the market rules they have so often exploited in the past to control their own supply chains. In the absence of a fresh supply of willing labour arriving at our airports from eastern Europe, British HGV drivers may end up being able to demand more – much more – for their services than they have been able to in the past. The supermarkets can well afford to pay and even the most bitter and angry Remainer will welcome such a development. Or they should.

But all of this raises another pertinent point over the legacy of freedom of movement.

During the 2016 referendum, campaigners for Leave were regularly accused of racism because we welcomed the prospect of the government being handed back powers over immigration. The accusation was intended to stifle and embarrass us and it must have come as something of a shock to our opponents when we shrugged our shoulders and dismissed such claims as illogical nonsense. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can see now why the existence of freedom of movement within the EU was so valuable, politically, to our Remain friends.

Aside from the cheap supply of labour – nannies, cleaners, etc – freedom of movement allowed its supporters to dismiss immigration as a political hot potato. “Yes, I understand your concerns, Mr Average Voter, but you see, it’s all up to the EU these days. Nothing we can do about it. Sorry about that. You’ll still vote for me, I trust…?”

Discarding freedom of movement alongside our EU membership meant that for the first time in decades, we were obliged to have an honest conversation about immigration and the rules that we, through our democratically-elected government, wanted to impose. We could no longer contract that discussion out to faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels.

And the Remainers understood that that would be a consequence of Brexit, one they seriously wanted to avoid.

Now they can’t. The ending of freedom of movement will have consequences, not all of which will be negative. But some will be, and we need to have a serious debate about the kind of immigration policy we want. The crucial point is that it is now our immigration policy, no one else’s, and we at last have the opportunity to shape it in order to benefit Britain and its economy. 

It's only natural that Remainers want to blame Brexit for everything that goes wrong, in the same way that some Eurosceptics blamed the EU in a similar fashion while we were members. But low-paid drivers saw no end to their plight until supermarket shelves started to empty. Paying them a decent wage will go a long way to solving the problem. Why not try that solution before reopening the supply of drivers who are happy to undercut British workers?