British Jobs for Indian Workers
On the latest shocking example of unfairness in Starmer's Britain
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Keir Starmer and the Labour government have just thrown British workers under the bus. That’s the conclusion you’d reach after reading the detail of Labour’s latest free trade deal with India, released yesterday.
The deal means that Indian workers who are here for less than three years will not pay National Insurance tax in the UK. That’s right —they will be exempt from the very same tax that Labour just hiked for British workers and businesses.
If an Indian company, in other words, transfers workers in from India then those workers and the firm will not have to pay National Insurance tax here in Britain. No matter how Labour try to spin it, this gives Indians major advantage over their British counterparts and will undermine the position of British workers.
Keir Starmer and his Labour government have not only broken their pre-election promise not to raise taxes in this country by clobbering British businesses and workers with those National Insurance tax rises —which is one reason why our economy is in the toilet—but are openly giving tax exemptions to Indian migrants.
While Labour ministers are doing the media rounds claiming this is not the case, and that similar, albeit shorter, exemptions are in place with other countries, this misses the key point. As India’s press release openly states in black and white, highlighting detail that was strangely absent in Labour’s own press release:
"The exemption is for Indian workers who are temporarily in the UK and their employers from paying social security contributions in the UK for a period of three years". It will, as the Indians note, make their own service providers “significantly more competitive in the UK” and “ease mobility” for Indian workers being transferred into Britain, as well as their partners and children.
Understandably, much of this is fuelling accusations that Labour and ‘two-tier Keir’ are presiding over a ‘two-tier tax system’ that will result in an even bigger influx of Indian workers that, amid the already enormous ‘Boriswave’, will put even more pressure on Britain’s collapsing public services, infrastructure, and social fabric.
Because the simple reality is that, from today, if you are an Indian company in the UK you now have a big incentive to undercut British workers, much like if you are a big firm based in the UK you already have an incentive to avoid paying British workers higher wages and improving their working conditions and instead hire the low-skill, low-wage, and hence cheaper migrants that have been flooding the country since 2019.
Our entire post-Brexit economy, in short, is being built around the wrong incentive structure —actively encouraging companies to look past the British people and British workers in favour of cheaper migrant workers from outside Europe.
In this way, the British economy is being hollowed out and gutted to supply …
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