So get this: poets are on the Home Office’s list of skilled workers, making them eligible for a UK work visa. How do you feel about that? Are you scoffing at the very idea?
Reform’s Lee Anderson is most certainly scoffing. It’s scoff central over at Red Wall HQ. He’s almost as apoplectic about the poets as he is about the inclusion and diversity managers who have also made the list. Not that 30p Lee is anti-literature, no, far from it, it’s just that we don’t need no foreign poets. No, not here in “the land of literary giants like Shakespeare and PG Wodehouse”, he declares, adding that as “a nation with the richest literary tradition in the world, the UK does not need to import poets”.
