Robert Peston Robert Peston

How will Boris build his ‘high-wage, high-skill’ Britain?

Getty images

There are a few problems with Boris Johnson’s big idea, namely that the sharp fall in the supply of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the UK – triggered by Brexit, reinforced by Covid – will automatically lead businesses to invest, such that the UK’s long history of low productivity and low incomes will end on his watch.

His vision, the philosophical heart of his speech to Tory conference this morning, is of a gleaming new ‘high wage, high skill, high productivity economy’ and that ‘we are not going back to the same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity, all of it enabled and assisted by uncontrolled immigration’.

It is important to note his stress on controlling immigration. This is obviously politics he likes, because so much of his case for taking the UK out of the EU was about regaining the power to decide who comes to live and work in the UK. But he is also persuaded it is good economics; that as if by magic, the UK will become significantly less economically dependent on low-skilled employment.

This is Johnson as Thatcher, as he made explicit to me yesterday when saying ‘there is no alternative’.

Whereas her obsession was empowering the private sector, and replacing state ownership and intervention with the rule of the markets, his is with changing the relative price of labour and capital (though I don’t expect him to use this language), such that it becomes more rational and commercial for businesses to substitute kit and machinery for cheap low-skilled people.

Boris seems blithely unbothered by the potential for strife and hardship that may flow for months and even years from the labour shortages that he wants and encouraged.

Who can recoil at Johnson’s UK where all the tedious menial jobs are carried out by robots and artificial intelligence, and everyone does jobs that robots can’t do – writing the computer programmes, fixing wonky robots or doing the few tasks that AI can’t take over (stand up comedy, and psychotherapy, for example)? So what could go wrong?

Well the first thing to note is that the UK’s lamentable history of low productivity massively predates the great waves of immigration from lower wage eastern Europe that began two decades ago.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Robert Peston
Written by
Robert Peston
Robert Peston is Political Editor of ITV News and host of the weekly political discussion show Peston. His articles originally appeared on his ITV News blog.

Topics in this article

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in