The Chancellor is a one-woman jobs destruction machine.
Rachel Reeves’s decision to slap a £25billion “jobs tax” on employers in last year’s Budget remains her single biggest blunder, and that’s saying something. Deutsche Bank immediately warned her hike to employer’s national insurance (NI) contributions would destroy 100,000 jobs.
Bloomberg Economics put the likely figure closer to 130,000. Both were too conservative. By August this year, 297,000 jobs had gone.
This morning, we got even more horrific news. When Reeves entered No 11, the UK unemployment rate stood at 4.1%. It’s now rocketed to an absolutely horrifying 5%. Wage growth is falling too.
Reeves calls this “fixing the foundations”. I’d call it a self-inflicted jobs bloodbath. And a recent report by The Times shows that British workers are on the front line.
When overseas workers apply for a NI number, they’re allocated one that identifies their nationality. The Times dug deeper into the figures and they’re jaw-dropping.
In the first six months under Reeves, 46,000 new jobs went to workers from India. Nigerians took 26,000. Applicants from Pakistan took 21,000.
Over the same period, the number of British workers in employment fell by a simply staggering 353,000. These figures exclude the self-employed, so the real imbalance may be even larger.
As The Times put it, Britain is “shovelling problematic citizens on to sickness benefit and using immigration to fill the resulting labour market vacuum”.
Every day, another 5,000 Britons flow onto sickness benefits. That pace would break the finances of almost any developed country.
The mental health crisis is partly to blame. But so is Reeves. As she destroys jobs, many are simply giving up. Many young people could now be stuck on benefits for life.
Boris Johnson unleashed the mass-immigration “Boriswave”. Reeves shows little sign of stopping it. In fact, Labour’s trade deal with India will make it worse, by making it £11,000 cheaper to hire migrants.
No wonder Labour is plunging in the polls, and Nigel Farage‘s Reform is flying.
