Blain’s Morning Porridge May 13^th 2025 – Care or Immigration – which don’t you want?

“The trick of a successful riot is persuading the ones carrying torches to blame the ones with the pitchforks.”

Sir Keir Starmer has jumped aboard  the populist bandwagon, pandering to voters convinced immigration is the UK’s greatest challenge and threat. Silly me… I thought it was the Russians, or jobs, or the economy. The reality is aging nations need workers.

Today we need a respite from trade deals, stagflation and the price of stocks… let’s focus on something else… Immigration.

I believe people are essentially good. When politics are failing and the blame game is being played, smart party leaders know it’s critical to find something to rally voters back around them. Populists have it easy – they know the hot button is always going to be immigrants. Nothing so unities the common people as fear of people who are different.

UK premier Sir Keir Starmer played to the house yesterday; announcing a tough new policy on immigrants – he’s going to make them wait longer, speak better English, and ask to see their degrees. A cartoon dressed him in country tweeds, a flat cap and a pint of beer spouting “I’m not a racist, but” – Starmer becomes Farage. It’s a fair point – ask any Brit for a list of Reform policies and they will say immigration…. and that’s about it. Starmer knows Reform is his only election threat.

But in modern society where populations are aging, and demographics are in play, there are always consequences….

Starmer has promised to cut 50,000 low-skilled and care visas straight away. Yay… but.. That’s bad cosmetics. The care industry, the fastest expanding need within the UK economy, is horrified. It pays the lowest wages but still struggles. Care services in the UK are the very bottom of the priority list. As everyone with aged parents soon discovers, it’s a lottery that barely works, and only does because cheap immigrant nurses are willing to do the jobs British workers apparently disdain.

There are fears the care system may collapse – highlighting the urgent need to reprioritise and refocus the UK’s flollopping National Health Service into something new that serves the needs of an aging, and increasingly infirm, elderly population. The NHS never really planned for an aging population – and still apparently hasn’t had the time to do so.

The looming crisis in care begs the question how to fix it? Much of the UK’s care has been outsourced to health “entrepreneurs” of varying quality, who often print glossy brochures but provide unreliable services. Running public health via the private sector is not really an option in the UK (witness the water companies).

The alternative would be for care to become a respected, properly enumerated profession within a better health service. It could be tactically at the local level by “district nurses”, and given an objective of creating decent, rewarding careers with a clear progression structure to those with a vocation for caring. Using local people in local care could boost the sense of community lost since Covid. It would cost, but be worth it and sustainable.

These “caring” people exist – you meet them all the time all around you, everyday – they are the kind people, the friendly people, those who ask about you first and genuinely care about your answer. But they need to be led into the profession. Not everyone has the gumption to jump on their bike to look for work. At present the only care profession options are  struggling care companies or local authorities, both paying the lowest wages possible and where the staff are treated as commodities. When benefits are on offer, or stacking shelves in supermarkets pays so much better – why struggle?

But give these underemployed people a vocation, some meaning, proper structure, respect, and they will thrive.

The failure of care and the need for immigrants to make it work is yet another tale of consequences – cut immigration and watch our elderly and vulnerable population suffer. The easy answer has been immigration. That’s been broadly the case across the whole economy for 80 years since the first of the Windrush generation arrived in the UK to fill labour shortages.

Immigration has made the UK what it is – a cosmopolitan nation. Our history is successive waves of immigrants bringing new skills and broadening our culture. We have successfully assimilated each immigrant wave – some quickly, some cultures take longer. Every generation there are crises – the Battle of Cable Street in the 1930s when UK Black Shirted fascists tried to pogrom East End Jews, or Huguenot riots in Spitalfields in 1600s. Everyone has a fear of the different – a fact politicians have exploited for millennia. Blame the outsiders is a common theme of divisive politics.

Illegal immigration in small boats is a fraction – less than 5% – of legal immigration. It helps fan the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment that so many of them are young men, clearly economic migrants. And, there is the criminality of the people smugglers. These bad actors tend to bury our sympathy for the horror stories of genuine victims of repressive regimes fleeting for all the right reasons.

To be fair, UK immigration policy has been a mess for decades. It didn’t really matter till the 1990s when immigration and emigration balanced each other out. It began to soar in the late 90s as more and more young upwardly mobile Europeans saw the UK’s position as a leading global financial, business and cultural centre as irresistible – even as Europe seem mired in zero growth. We joked about how much harder-working Polish builders were than expensive, lazy Brits.

In 2010 the Tory/Lib coalition promised to stem mass immigration – but the good intent got buried somewhere amongst all the other stuff that went missing during 15 years of political dither on all sides. (We can’t blame Cameron, May, Johnston or Sunak for everything when Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn was the alternative. But, I can dismiss Truss as a numpty.). Brexit was the turning point. Did we really believe that stopping bright young Europeans from coming to the UK to work in bars, hotels, and across the gamut of roles feckless Brits thought below them, was going to help the economy?

Following Covid the rules changed again – and it was immigrants from the former Empire that filled jobs in the NHS and came as foreign students. The numbers expanded dramatically. Where there should have been a crackdown was in allowing them to bring their families with them. Today India and Nigeria are not long voyages away – everyone has a phone, and flights are faster than myself driving up to North Wales to help my wife care for her aging parents.

Over the pond in the USA, Trump has gone even further playing the immigrant card. He can claim massive success – a 98% reduction in illegal border crossings since December. The flood of migrants across the Mexican border is now a trickle  – it’s the first screaming policy success for his second administration. Millions of Maga voters cite it as an undeniable signal Trump is getting policy right.

However, as the Atlantic magazine points out this morning: “a quiet border does not provide dramatic visual images.” Thus, US residents are being treated to constant media-stream showing illegal immigrants being swiped off the streets by flack-jacketed ICE swot teams, middle aged Latinas being dragged from their cars as their windscreens are shattered around them, and immigrants with no criminal convictions being deported. Few Americans seem to have much sympathy for foreign students spending weeks slammed into crowded holding cells, dressed in prison orange for saying something unwisely radical on campus. That’ll teach them to disrespect American values.

Recently I read how Trump has demanded West Point, the premier US military academy, purges all courses and books on DEI – prompting a slew of righteous warnings from lefties. Over the weekend I met an American professor from Florida. She was in despair -the authorities have AI trawling their course notes for signs of leftist, ESG or DEI aberrational thinking. There is a list of banned books on campus – ironically Fahrenheit 451 is on the list to be burnt.

That’s what America voted for. I am sure many are shocked that’s what they’ve now got.

However, now we are hearing from the thousands of small businesses across the states about their urgent need for staff. Who is doing the cleaning in LA? Who is picking the crops in the field? At least the hoteliers will be ok given the collapse in tourism to the USA.

Back to the usual stuff on markets tomorrow…

Out of time, and back to the day job (from North Wales this week…)

Bill Blain

Author of the Morning Porridge

Founder Windshift Capital

Partner Shard Capital