Starmer and Reeves are flogging the UK economy to death. If the economy was a working animal, already on its knees and yet still being piled high with the extra baggage of taxes and regulatory burdens, the RSPCA would have brought a prosecution for cruelty. In less than a year we have seen business confidence undermined, the country’s richest fleeing as confirmed in the Sunday Times’ Rich List, unemployment rise by 10%, and in the three months to April, job vacancies have fallen by 5.3%.
It is young Brits who will suffer the most, though, as Labour is now making employing first-time workers too risky and too expensive with a toxic combination of its Employment Rights Bill, an increase in the minimum wage and the rise in National Insurance contributions.
Added to that Starmer’s youth mobility deal, in his latest Brexit surrender, will make things a whole lot worse as he opens the gates to the under-30s across the EU – as if we haven’t got enough immigration already.
For while the youth unemployment rate in the UK is bad – and has gone up to 14.2% – it is even worse across the EU.
In Spain it’s 26.4%, Sweden 24.1%, Portugal 20.7% and France 17.7%. So, when Starmer allows them all in, we can expect another wave of foreign nationals heading to the UK.
It’s easy to see why the EU wants this mobility scheme, to push its youth unemployment problems here. It’s not so easy to understand why Starmer is agreeing to this.
Mind you, he isn’t known for his deal-making skills, having caved in to Mauritius over the Chagos Islands, and to India over their people not having to pay National Insurance if they come here to work.
In short, when Starmer negotiates, Britain loses, and young people will be the ones who lose out the most.
We have already seen the number of graduate schemes in the UK plunge by a third over the last year, and new figures from recruitment platform Adzuna for entry-level jobs shows around a 65% drop this year.
Even more shocking are the figures from the Centre for Social Justice’s Lost Boys report, which shows young British male Neet (not in employment, education or training) figures up 40% since the pandemic, and not recovering.
Given that backdrop, it is utter madness for Starmer to decide to let the EU’s youth arrive on our shores.
How on earth does it help young people in Britain struggling to find a job to allow even more young people into the country to compete for those jobs?
The reality is that Starmer has always wanted to overturn the result of the Brexit referendum, but daren’t say so openly.
So this free movement of young people will be just the first part of getting us back into the EU salami style… slice by slice.
He is more interested in cosying up to other EU leaders strutting around on the world stage than standing up for our interests at home.
“Surrender Starmer” is already haemorrhaging votes in the traditional Labour Red Wall heartlands which voted overwhelmingly for Brexit.
This latest capitulation to the EU will prove to be the final straw for many of those voters.