Despite virtually every politician in Britain telling voters they want fewer arrivals, competing economic pressures have pushed ministers to use their absolute control of immigration rules to quietly liberalize.
“The increase in net migration from 2019 to 2023 resulted mostly from non-EU citizens coming on work and study visas,” said Ben Brindle, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory.
“Universities started to recruit students overseas more actively as their financial situation deteriorated, while social care providers turned to migrant care workers to fill vacancies as poor pay and working conditions in the sector, caused by limited government funding, made it increasingly difficult to retain workers.”
Elsewhere, bold promises during the EU referendum that the U.K.’s beloved National Health Service could be resuscitated with money redirected from Brussels have also failed to deliver. OECD figures collated by the Health Foundation think tank show the U.K. still spent at least a quarter less on its health services in 2022 than France, the Netherlands and Germany.
Stephen Rocks, an economist at the Health Foundation, told POLITICO: “The U.K.’s economy is already smaller and will grow more slowly because of Brexit. Weak economic growth has been at the heart of our struggle to fund health care and other public services adequately for more than a decade.” Max Warner, a health economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, added that “NHS performance against many measures is substantially worse than in 2016-17.”
Beyond peak Brexit
It all adds up. Guy Verhofstadt, the outspoken ex-prime minister of Belgium who represented the European Parliament in talks between London and Brussels, thinks “Peak Brexit” has already been reached.
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Publish date : 2024-07-04 07:00:00
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The post The UK’s Brexit dream is dead – POLITICO first appeared on Love Europe.
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Author : love-europe
Publish date : 2024-10-07 07:20:42
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