Philip Hammond told LBC’s Andrew Marr last night that the government should consider relaxing immigration rules.
He said this could help bring down inflation and thus ease the mortgage crisis.
Could the man be more out of touch?
His argument presumably is that more immigration would equal more competition for jobs and therefore we’d see less wage inflation.
This is quite an interesting admission, considering we’ve been told time and time again that freedom of movement has no significant downward effect on wages.
So, which one is it? And what ever happened to the high skill, high wage economy we were promised?
Phil noted that the government has regarded any relaxation of migration rules as being “politically toxic”.
Again, I’m not sure what planet Hammond is living on? Last year alone we saw 1.2 million people come to the UK. Clearly the government doesn’t believe it’s that toxic.
But at least he has the sense to realise that “let’s increase immigration to push down wages” isn’t going to be a great vote winner.
To some liberals, it seems that immigration is the answer to every economic problem we face.
But how on earth is more immigration now the key to cutting inflation and ameliorating the mortgage crisis?
Has he suddenly forgotten that we face an acute housing crisis, which mass immigration has made demonstrably worse (while inflating prices even further)?
Or that we still suffer from poor productivity, despite net migration being consistently in the hundreds of thousands?
Unless he’s planning to convince the government to liberalise planning law and set all new migrants to work on building sites, it will only worsen the situation we currently face.
Hmmm, well. Back to the drawing board, I guess for Phil!