Manchester, Oct 3 (BNA) British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Sunday he would not return to “uncontrolled immigration” to solve the Christmas fuel, gas and food crises, noting that such pressures were part of a post-Brexit adjustment period. European.
At the start of the Conservative Party conference, Johnson was again forced to defend his government against complaints from those who can’t get gasoline for their cars, retailers warned of shortages at Christmas, and gas companies struggled with soaring wholesale prices, Reuters reported.
The British leader wanted to use Congress to turn the page on more than 18 months of COVID-19 and refocus his 2019 election pledges to tackle regional inequality, crime and welfare.
Instead, the prime minister found himself behind nine months after Britain finalized its exit from the European Union – an exit he said would give the country the freedom to better shape its economy.
“The way forward for our country is not just to pull the big lever of uncontrolled immigration, and to allow large numbers of people to do work…so what I won’t do is go back to the old failed model of low wages, low skills backed by uncontrolled immigration,” he told Andrew’s Program Mar Show for BBC programme.
“When people voted for change in 2016 and … again in 2019 as they did, they voted for the end of a disruptive model of the UK economy based on low wages, low skills and chronically low productivity, and we are moving away from that.”
It was the closest the prime minister came to admitting that Brexit had strained supply chains and the workforce, extending everything from fuel deliveries to potential Christmas turkey shortages.
“There will be a period of adjustment, but I think that’s what we need to see,” he said.
But he was clear that he would not open the immigration spigots to fill these gaps, shifting the responsibility back on to companies to raise wages and attract more workers.
Post-Brexit worker shortages and the COVID-19 pandemic have wreaked havoc in some sectors of the economy, disrupting shipments of fuel and medicine and leaving more than 100,000 pigs facing slaughter due to a shortage of Appbatware workers.
Conservative Party chairman Oliver Dowden said the government was taking measures to hire more truck drivers overall, and that the government had begun training personnel for military tankers to start delivering fuel on Monday.
“We’re going to make sure people get turkeys for Christmas, and I know that for Environment Secretary George Eustice, that’s high on his list,” he told Sky News.
Rather than the reset that Johnson had hoped to preside over in the northern English city of Manchester, the conference appears to have been overshadowed by supply chain crises and criticism of the government’s withdrawal of an increase in state benefits for low-income families. .
Johnson may also be criticized for breaking the conservative position as a low tax party after raising it to help the health and social care sectors.
“We don’t want to raise taxes of course, but what we won’t do is be irresponsible in public finances,” he said. “If I can avoid that, I don’t want to raise taxes again, of course not.”