I need to be clear, I don’t want to write about our Prime Minister anymore. It makes me mad and angry. I want to be sane and grown-up, not feel like a furious child, stamping my foot and raging in this column because something incomprehensible is going on.
Instead, I’d rather talk about the crisis in the labour market and why so many business owners are facing hurdles that few in government are discussing. Namely, that they can’t hire people to meet demand. And that’s a problem for productivity. They are also having to engage in a price war with competing employers to fill jobs. And then they must pass those costs to their customers and so the vicious circle goes on. Raising productivity has to be at the core of our recovery, or we will continue to slide towards stagflation.
This feels like a concrete topic we can discuss like adults, raising conversation above the low bar of partygate and the man behind it.
Rishi Sunak’s relief package yesterday will certainly help those most in need. But lurking beneath the more shocking economic figures is the problem of growing job vacancies. As the ONS states in its May 2022 labour market overview: “For the first time since records began, there are fewer unemployed people than job vacancies.”
I suspect lots of business owners know exactly what I am talking about. Many are tearing their hair out. My husband just lost a sous chef, who quit the night before he was meant to start. He was poached by another restaurant business also desperate to hire. This didn’t happen before. And it’s not only happening in hospitality.
When I hosted a show on LBC last weekend, callers from all over the country painted the same picture: I heard from an engineer, a chartered surveyor, a young woman working at an equine business and a lady trying to hire cleaners for her rental business in Devon. And their anecdotal experiences are reflected by the ONS figures. There are still nearly a million fewer in the workforce than pre-pandemic trends — the great early retirement and the return of millions to the EU chief drivers.
At the Tory conference last October, labour shortages were dominating the headlines. Three Cabinet ministers admitted to me their labour plan post Brexit, with problems exacerbated by the pandemic, was far from developed. The Government can tweak immigration to our needs, and for the NHS it granted 150,000 new visas. But it is a much more complex process. There is both a skills mismatch and a literal lack of human bodies to fill jobs. Free movement of labour was not only about cheap labour but providing labour in every category. Controlling immigration was the great Brexit win. So where is their coherent strategy?
The party line that autumn included a lecture to business owners on how they needed to stop relying on cheap labour, how the country needed to skill up, and how robots would fill lots of empty low-paid jobs. None were terrible suggestions. They were merely wholly unsuited to deal with the scale of the crisis — then and now.
Why not have easier access for workers from EU countries? After all, it is easier to go into and out of a job market if your home country is nearby. What are the Government doing to tempt more of the inactive working age people back into the job market? Where are the plans to get more pensioners into part-time work — there’s evidence it’s great for mental health.
Instead, every day for months focus has been swiped by partygate. Of course the Government wants to move on. It’s their leader who hasn’t let them. He could have first halted the parties. He didn’t. He joined in. And then when the rumours began to slip out, Johnson deflected to the behaviour he knows best — to prevaricate and twist the truth. And lies begat lies. At the heart of Westminster, that’s not OK.
Yes, Downing Street is a rabbit warren. Yes, press teams drink, though vomiting and being rude to the staff has never been tolerated. I have been there enough to know how close a lot of those vital power centres are. Politicians and their aides also gossip, non- stop: no affair is ever hidden, no idle chit chat escapes spreading.
The Prime Minister knew. And it makes us mad. Mainly because his antics will always distract us and distract the work of government. And everyone else pays the price. That’s why I can’t talk it about it anymore. I want to focus on businesses that drive our economy and how they can be saved, so we can all stay sane.
Texas school shooting horror claims another victim
It is unbearably sad that Joe Garcia, the husband of Irma Garcia, one of the two teachers brutally murdered in the school shooting in Texas on Tuesday, has died of a heart attack following his wife’s horrendous death.
They had four children. To lose their mother, then quickly their father is unimaginable. The couple had been married for 24 years. There is such a thing as heartbreak syndrome, the muscle of your heart can literally rupture — it happened to a friend of mine when she lost her beloved husband during Covid, her grief caused her heart to tear. Thankfully for their young son, she survived. It reminds us that our ability as humans to love can render us hopeless, drive us mad and can even break us. But ultimately we know that love is also what saves us.
Ray Liotta was a star and he deserved more
RIP Ray Liotta. Another one of my favourite actors has died. New Jersey born, he resonated with generations young and old because of his role in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. When my teenage son watched the 1990 mafia epic during lockdown, he was transfixed as much by Liotta, above, as I had been two decades before. Despite his reputation and prodigious talent, he didn’t go on to become a leading man, and Scorsese didn’t hire him again, which always struck me as strange, as he often acted everyone else off the screen in Goodfellas. I watched him in last year’s Sopranos spin off The Many Saints of Newark — worth seeing only for his electric performance. Adopted at six months, Liotta had always assumed he was Italian, but later discovered he was also Scottish. Somehow, that become another reason to love him.
