The government’s narrative around Brexit is changing. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng is presumably following the agreed line in suggesting people will have to ‘tough it out’ while we ‘transition’ from a low skilled-low wage economy to a high skilled- high wage one. How long this will take is anyone’s guess. Mine is that it won’t be in the lifetime of anybody living in Britain today.
There is much talk of skills training and a knowledge based economy, all laudable things I’m sure but it will make little difference even if the government had a clue how to achieve such an aim.
Ministers are fond of telling people we are world leaders in this, thot or the other but in my experience in engineering, manufacturing, process industries, industrial controls and end-of-line packaging systems we are still in the dark ages. There has been no renaissance. We don’t have any ‘world leaders’ at all in those fields - as far as I know.
Years ago, I went through various management training courses and there was often specific modules on staff development and training. One I remember was labelled A-K-S for Attitude, Knowledge and Skills. The key one wasn’t knowledge or skills, it was attitude.
You can give people a skill. They can increase their knowledge, these are relatively easy, provided you have a proper long-term funded programme to achieve it that all political parties can agree on. Otherwise, programmes get cancelled, new ones are launched - and then cancelled later, and so on. It’s all stop start and motivated by short term political PR rather than a serious attempt to improve productivity.
In any case, what you can’t do is change attitudes quickly. People enter the workforce with an attitude and for the most part, they keep that attitude until they retire.
I am talking here about basic things like turning up on time, working diligently when there, putting in the effort, showing a bit of determination to get the work done, being self motivated and prepared to learn new things to apply yourself properly and take work seriously.
This is a terrific example of what I’m talking about:
Ferrari: "I give you half a dozen Romanian apple pickers and half a dozen British apple pickers, who's going to pick more apples?"Caller Tom, who has an orchard in Maidstone: "Definitely Romanians."Ferrari: "Why's that?"Tom: "They're just more driven."— Theo Usherwood (@theousherwood) October 4, 2021
What Tom calls 'driven', I call attitude, but it amounts to the same thing. Note that fruit picking does not require any particular skill or any knowledge - even I can do it. What it does need is the attitude to take it seriously and realise you are doing important work.
This morning I listened to Andy Street, Tory Mayor of Birmingham, on the Today programme talking about British industry employing more British people, doing more training of and investing in British workers. He claimed this is what voters were demanding in 2016. We shall see.
The problem is that isolating yourself behind trade barriers is not always the panacea they think it is.
Brexit may mean more British workers being employed but they will still be competing with EU workers albeit in a different way. Fruit is going to be picked on both sides of the Channel, but if British pickers are less productive and need higher pay, their fruit will have a higher price. We will have achieved through Brexit a high wage-low skill economy.
Supermarkets, unless they are legally prevented from doing so, and it’s hard to see under the TCA how they could be, will buy fruit from the cheapest, most reliable source with the best quality. Ask yourself who that is likely to be?
There is no advantage at all in simply paying ourselves more money without a corresponding increase in productivity otherwise prices will rise and inflation will take off. This is exactly what the government appears to be planning.
And talking of inflation, I note the imbecile in charge of the retailer Next is begging the government to allow in more migrant workers under a sponsored visa scheme where businesses can bring in as many workers as they wish. Good luck with that one. It looks like freedom of movement in disguise.
Lord Wolfson, high profile Brexit supporter writes in the London Evening Standard that the government is getting it wrong on immigration. Without a ready supply of labour he says raising nominal wages can only result in a "Seventies-style inflationary spiral."
It’s perhaps an indication of how Britain has managed to sink to such a level when men (it’s usually men isn’t it?) rise to the very pinnacle of British industry without a clue what they are doing. Simon Wolfson, or Baron Wolfson of Aspley Guise to give him his full title, was six years old when Britain joined the EU so has zero idea of what things were like at the time, yet he is a strong Brexiteer,
In The Retail Gazette in August 2019 he claimed that a no deal Brexit would only cause ‘mild disruption.’ We actually went on to get a deal and now he's bleating about labour shortages and he's concerned about a 70s style inflationary spiral. If this happens - and it looks a nailed on certainty - mild disruption will be the understatement of the century.
Wolfson, supported the Leave campaign in 2016 referendum, and said Johnson's government "was doing a better job at preparing for Brexit than the previous administration led by Theresa May." Amazing. How dim can you get?
In the next year or so we are going to be entering a period where price increases become the norm and this is a dangerous thing. Manufacturers and suppliers will opt for the easy route and raise prices because ‘everybody is doing it’ and buyers will somehow accept that it has become the norm. Your competitors are doing it, the public has been softened up to think it’s coming anyway and so this is what you do.
We shouldn’t forget that all costs are ultimately for wages. Raw materials are free, iron ore, cotton, water, air, trees and so on. When labour costs rise everything will cost more.
Unfortunately, unless the same thing happens in the EU, unless they suffer the same shortages, our costs will rise more and our goods will be priced out of the market.
But this is what the people voted for - really?
