In a relatively quiet week for politics, there is probably just two things of particular interest.
The first is a couple of side-line conferences by those on the more right wing end of my party. The Conservative Democratic Organisation, dedicated to bringing back Boris (we have yet to find anyone who wants to bring back Liz) was followed by another, whose key speech raised some eyebrows.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman spoke of her desire to stop the UK’s reliance on migrant workers. In it, she spoke of her desire to train our ambitious youth to be fruit pickers and lorry drivers, thus pushing back nearly 250 years of economic orthodoxy. To be clear, this is not Conservative policy, merely her own thoughts.
The UK economy seeks to be ever more productive – producing ever more value per hour worked. This is a good thing as it allows our population to enjoy better standards of living and by and large it has worked. We export those lesser productive jobs – textiles are manufactured, for example, in lower economic countries, allowing those countries, in turn, to improve their own standards of living. Where we need domestic, lesser productive activities, we flex our workforce by allowing migrant workers to do those jobs. The idea that we should be instructing a proportion of our youth to lower paid jobs because we don’t want to allow migrant workers seems unwise and bizarre.
More importantly, however, the car industry has highlighted a big problem. As we move to electric cars, we need batteries. But given we don’t make them here and seem unlikely to do so, we have to import them. But the battery pack in a car is about half the value and so the clauses in all our trade deals regarding “country of origin” will be tested.
This rule prevents manufacturers gaming trade agreements. It prevents an assembly plant being set up in a country where a trade deal gives special access to a third market, whilst the true economic value comes back to the home country of the manufacturer.
A fall out of Brexit, and an unexpected one, this could be bad news locally. We have several tier 2 and 3 automotive supply companies and the expected job losses, without action, could be 180,000 across the UK. We are not immune in Wyre Forest. It is something I am keeping a very close eye on.