Food for thought for Brexiteers

One could tell a surprisingly comprehensive history of the Brexit project by simply talking about food.

From curved bananas to non-recyclable teabags, Eurosceptics have long relied on myths and scurrilous half-truths about groceries to stoke public resentment over the supposed red-tape lunacy of the European Union.

More recently, Brexiteers have taken up the (mostly false) idea that the EU discriminates intensely against African smallholders in order to protect its own inefficient farmers. The pro-Brexit Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski posed sombrely in front of a tray of supermarket lemons this month in order to lambast “the EU protectionist racket”.

But it’s not just Africans who will benefit from Brexit. The Sun informs us that after we leave the EU the Great British shopper will all be able to save 40p on a pack of butter and 31p on a punnet of strawberries and much else besides thanks to the tariff-torching free trade deals we will inevitably sign with other countries.

Brexiteers seem to believe that a way to a Briton’s support is through his or her stomach. Taking control is framed as taking control, above all else, of our grocery basket.

But it’s not all one way. The Brexit food fight is a symmetrical one. US “chlorinated” chicken has become the spectre at the feast, a symbol of what the powerful US agricultural lobby will ram down our throats as the price of an inevitably unequal American trade deal. And few of the no-deal consequence warnings cut through to the public quite as effectively as the threat of a sandwich shortage.

They sometimes try to conceal it, but the agenda of some Brexiteers is plainly deregulatory. One of the reasons the forecasts produced by a small band of pro-Brexit economists show long-term gains for the UK, when every other credible study shows precisely the opposite, is that their models assume we will in future shed all our domestic product standards, including on food imports, and trade on what are known as “world prices”.

But the lines between ideological fantasy and reality are becoming blurred. UK ministers insist there will be no compromising of high food standards after Brexit. They also say that in the event of a no-deal Brexit they would waive customs and standards checks on trucks delivering produce from the EU in order to mitigate transport bottlenecks and supermarket shortages. They have not said what, in those circumstances, is to stop some criminal group importing unsafe produce to the UK. Perhaps they believe it’s a risk worth taking.

Regulation 1168 of the European Council, from 2011, is just the sort of Brussels red tape that Brexiteers love to hate. It lays out a host of requirements for food manufacturers, from providing detail on the geographical origin of produce to its nutritional content.

But it also says that packaging should warn buyers about ingredients that can cause a dangerous allergic reaction. Fifteen-year-old Natasha Ednan-Laerouse from Fulham died in 2016 after eating a baguette from Pret A Manger which did not list traces of sesame, to which she was allergic, on its packaging.

This was not, in fact, a requirement under the EU regulation because it was a fresh handmade product, although many people, in light of this tragedy, believe this is a regulatory loophole that urgently needs to be closed. The coroner in the case said last week that he would be writing to the government to raise concerns about “inadequate” food labelling regulation.

Brexiteers will argue that this extremely sad incident has no bearing on the issue of EU membership. And in one sense they’re correct. There’s no reason why the UK post-Brexit shouldn’t have new domestic regulations on food labelling that are even tighter in some specific areas.

Yet this, of course, is at odds with their deregulatory impulses and the dream of importing food at world prices. Moreover, it highlights a huge and still unrecognised blind spot on trade. For it is pan-European regulatory harmonisation, regardless of whether those regulations are well-designed or not, that helps UK food exporters to tap into a significant market in the EU. It is this harmonisation that dismantles what Margaret Thatcher once called the “insidious” trade barriers of “different national standards”.

Assuming that the rest of the world does not join us post-Brexit in a bonfire of food standards – and there is no reason to expect that they will – our producers will have to conform to the standards of other countries if we wish to sell into their markets. Taking back control from the EU will simply mean submitting to the authority of others jurisdictions, whether that’s the US, Canada, India or wherever. And to sell into the EU we would still have to conform to the single market’s food regulations, even if we are out of it.

Yes, there are costs from regulation. It’s onerous to perform tests, to fill in paperwork, print labels and all the rest. But there are vast economic benefits too.

It was 30 years ago this month that Margaret Thatcher made her speech in Bruges, seen by eurosceptics as the lighting of the torch of national resistance to Brussels. Yet earlier in 1988 the prime minister had made another speech on the urgency of completing the single market.

“There was a tendency in Europe to talk in lofty tones of European Union,” she said on the subject of regulatory harmonisation. “That may be good for the soul. But the body – Europe’s firms and organisations and the people who work in them – needs something more nourishing.”

 Food for thought for Brexiteers today.

#MargaretThatcher #singlemarket #foodstandards #Brexit #EuropeanUnion

The fall of Lehman Brothers: ten years of hurt

Cast your mind back 10 years. Survey the political scene. What can you see? The Labour Party has been in power for 11 years. And it seems to be winning the big argument. The new leaders of the Conservative Party, David Cameron and George Osborne, have stopped calling for tax cuts and are instead pledging to match Labour’s public service spending plans. “Sharing the proceeds of growth” is the mantra.

Survey the economic scene. What’s going on there? Well, there’s much talk on the business pages of newspapers of a somewhat mysterious “credit crunch”. Northern Rock went under the year before. House prices are down. The stock market is looking a bit sickly. The economy seems to be slowing.

Yet a recession warning by the chancellor, Alistair Darling, is viciously stamped on by aides of the prime minister, Gordon Brown. After all, the Treasury is projecting GDP growth only to dip slightly before rapidly bouncing back. The independent Bank of England expects a similar happy ending.

Survey the international scene. Over in America, George W Bush had been spending lavishly on wars and doling out tax cuts for the super rich. Growth is slowing stateside too. But it’s all under control.

The former chief central banker Alan Greenspan had been hailed as the “maestro” of monetary policy, with a knack for cutting interest rates at precisely the right moment to allow the world’s largest economy to ride out downturns with minimal damage.

His successor, Ben Bernanke, is seen as an almost equally safe pair of hands. Further afield China is still booming. And closer to home Europe is growing nicely, defying eurosceptic predictions of doom for the single currency project.

Aside from a few mavericks, most economists seem relaxed about the economy. After all, hadn’t the Nobel Prize winner Bob Lucas ruled that “the central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes”? Financiers are still heroes, filling public coffers in the UK and the US to the brim with their tax payments.

“Let me thank you for the scale of the contribution you make to the British economy,” Brown had told bankers assembled at the annual white-tie Mansion House dinner in the heart of the City of London back in 2004. The sentiment hadn’t changed.

“Let me thank you also for the resilience, the innovative flair and the courage to change with which you have responded to the challenge of global competition.”

Every bright young university graduate seems to want to work in the City or Wall Street. And it isn’t just for those million-pound bonuses. A career in finance promises prestige and power. Fred Goodwin, the boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland, now the largest bank in the world, is a knight of the realm.

Hank Paulson, the former boss of the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs, is George Bush’s treasury secretary.

It was another world.

Then Lehman Brothers went bust and swept it all away.

An economic cliff-edge

In the early days of the financial crisis, which the collapse of the Wall Street bank seemed to have brought to a head, it was not uncommon – even as markets tanked and economic activity slipped off a cliff – to hear people predict that it would all be over; if not by Christmas, then relatively soon.

Those giant banks were extremely well capitalised, we were told. This was just the return of our long-lost friend, the business cycle. The alarm was grossly overdone.

Looking back 10 years on, it’s clear how wrong this all was. This really was the big one. After Lehman went bust the multitrillion-dollar global financial markets simply seized up. International trade experienced a terrifying, sudden stop.

The entire global economy tipped into recession as frightened households and businesses slammed shut their wallets. It was the deepest slump in the UK since the 1920s. In America it was the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

To keep the caravan on the road, central banks slashed interest rates to their lowest levels in 5,000 years.

And when rates could be cut no further they had to print money – hundreds of billions of dollars, pounds, yen and, belatedly, euros.

The year after Lehman collapsed two American economists, Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, produced a timely book showing that when slumps are brought on by financial crises the recoveries tend to be far slower than otherwise.

And so it has come to pass. What the Fed chair Ben Bernanke labelled “the biggest financial crisis in history” has delivered one of the weakest recoveries in history. In Europe, it has turned out to be worse than the aftermath of the slump in the 1930s.

Throughout much of the west, we have seen a decade of stagnant incomes and flatlining living standards.

Here in Britain we are in the midst of the most miserable decade for real wages since the Napoleonic War.

Where would we have been without the crash? Andy Haldane of the Bank of England estimated that the total cost of the slump measured in foregone economic growth was between $60 trillion (£ 46 trillion) and $200 trillion, or between one and four times the planet’s GDP.

“To call these numbers ‘astronomical’ would be to do astronomy a disservice,” he observed.

Haldane has also hypothesised that a kind of primitive “dread risk” – an imprint left in the minds of households and businesses by the traumatic financial collapse – is the reason economic animal spirits have been so weak this past decade.

There has been a generalised national economic withdrawal. Cross-border capital flows have slowed dramatically. International trade as a share of GDP has been declining. Globalisation isn’t dead, but it seems to have peaked. Donald Trump’s trade war and his assault on the World Trade Organisation could conceivably deal the coup de grace.

In the months after Lehman, as tax revenues evaporated, governments allowed their budget deficits to swell. Many even deliberately ratcheted up spending or cut taxes as a form of fiscal stimulus. Anything to put a floor under cratering demand.

It’s amazing to look at a chart showing the evolution of debt in the developed world in the years after the crisis. As finance sector debt drops like a stone in 2008 through banks deleveraging en masse this is almost exactly matched by a surge in government liabilities.

It was as if the debt was simply handed over from the private to the public sector. Total debt as a share of global GDP is now higher than it was a decade ago, mainly due to a colossal burst of stimulatory bank lending in China.

Yet policy in the west changed suddenly in 2010. Faced by that astonishing surge in borrowing governments seemed to collectively decide that it was time for fiscal consolidation. It was, of course, a heinous policy mistake. The recovery was far from secure. The time for such retrenchment is during the boom not the slump. And growth duly dipped again, as Keynesians warned.

For some politicians the austerity turn was a result of a genuine, albeit misplaced, fear that bond investors were about to dump government debt and force a national solvency crisis. For others the shift from stimulus to cuts had a more ideological motivation – shrinking the state in order to cut taxes.

Either way, the financial crisis gave birth to what David Cameron himself called an “age of austerity”.

The era of zero-sum politics

When economies are growing, the pie gets bigger and politics is a positive sum game. A consequence of weak growth or stagnant incomes is that political arguments are increasingly about the division of the pie.

One person’s gain becomes another person’s loss. Rancour and desperation abound.

There’s an endless squabble among economists about whether inequality has actually worsened since the financial crisis. Different data supports different interpretations. Wealth inequality has almost certainly grown, in no small part because emergency money printing by central banks automatically boosted asset values and those with lots of assets in the first place got richer.

Moreover, public perceptions are pretty clear. Recent polling found that more than half of people in the UK believe the economy has become more unfair over the last decade, while just 10 per cent believe it has become fairer.

Economic disappointments and a rising sense of injustice over the past decade have changed our politics.

It’s hard to imagine a left-wing protest politician like Jeremy Corbyn becoming the Labour leader and utterly transforming the party if the financial crisis had not detonated a bomb under the New Labour model of funding public services and welfare through ever rising City tax receipts.

It is difficult to imagine a slim majority of the British people ignoring the advice of all mainstream politicians, almost every major employer and the archbishop of Canterbury, and voting to rip the UK out of the European Union without that mass discrediting of elites a decade ago.

Theresa May’s policy agenda when she became prime minister – workers on boards, capping energy prices – was well to the left of anything that David Cameron produced. It was actually to the left even of much of Tony Blair’s record.

This Tory swerve was a recognition of that shift in the public mood. Even once-staunch laissez-faire Brexiteers like Michael Gove have pandered to the new popular feeling with promises of interventions in the economy that they would surely previously have decried as socialism.

It’s important to recognise that the economic effects have been very unevenly felt. The pay of people in their twenties in the UK is still well below where that of the same cohort was in 2008. Pensioners, by contrast, have been protected. Averages can conceal as much as they reveal.

Youth unemployment across the eurozone reached eye-watering levels and still remains extremely high.

The labour force participation rate for young men in the US has not recovered since the crash. Like some kind of a cursed diamond, economists warn that the psychological scarring of a period of unemployment early in life lasts for a lifetime.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that this luckless generation, which has entered the workforce since the crash, harbours a much more negative attitude towards finance and free markets than older generations.

European politics, in particular, has undergone a revolution in the past decade. Mainstream social democratic parties have collapsed in support across Europe. The radical left and populist right have been the primary beneficiaries. The catastrophically handled eurozone crisis is the proximate cause – but the emergency was brought on by the bursting of the global bubble in 2008.

The post-crisis flood of economic anxiety helps explain the surge of social resistance to proposed trade deals (like the reviled “TTIP”), both in Europe and America, that now comes not just from the usual antiglobalisation pressure groups but increasingly also the middle classes.

It helps explain the widespread paranoia about robots taking humans’ jobs, even, ironically, as automation proceeds at a snail’s pace and (human) employment rates are high or recovering. The context is torrents of anxiety released by the breaking of the dam of security in the financial crisis.

And then there’s immigration. Despite the bilious propaganda of the populist right, migration flows have not been responsible for people’s economic pain either in Europe or America. But migration pressures on public finances have hit at a time when many families have been under severe financial stress. Migrants have, true to the dismal historic pattern, been a convenient and salient target for public frustration.

And then there’s Trump – an experience-free, overtly racist, self-confessed molester of women winning the White House. Listen to Trump’s invocation at his inauguration address of “rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation”, his excoriation of “the false song of globalism”.

Heed, too, the promise of the most powerful politician in Italy, Matteo Salvini, “to give voice to those [European] populations that are cut down by those who only ever cared about financial outcomes and the multinationals and who have offered us a future of precariousness and fear”.

Immigration-obsessed nativists they may be, but they appeal to economic grievance and anxiety. Modern populism’s parentage can be traced back to the financial crisis.

Finance less proud

The first bit of banker bashing, oddly enough, came from Alan Sugar. Publicising the latest series of The Apprentice back in 2008, he declared had no time for the “30-year-old open-collared” bankers who had been sniffy about his hit TV show and laughed at his posturing as a hyper-successful businessman.

“They sit there and criticise me, saying what a bloody wanker I am,” he complained, “and then they lose £ 1bn and Bear Stearns [the Wall Street bank rescued in March] goes down the drain in the middle of the night.” Such sentiments were rare 10 years ago. Now they are etched deep in our culture.

The political status of bankers and financiers had utterly changed thanks to the crash. No ambitious politician today would dream of presenting him or herself as a champion of finance in the way that Gordon Brown did a decade ago.

In the run up to the Brexit referendum, the official Leave campaign – stewarded by cabinet members Michael Gove and Boris Johnson – even produced an attack video drawing attention to the fact that the Bank of England governor Mark Carney had once worked for Goldman Sachs.

The inference was that his warnings about the likely harm of Brexit were not only to be disregarded as Project Fear, but reviled as the corrupt works of an evil banker.

It’s notable how the voice and interests of the City in the Brexit negotiations have commanded far less respect than they would have a decade ago. The government did not, in the end, lift a finger to protect the single market “passport” for financial services.

A low profile is the new normal. A decade ago a banker would have been happy to announce his profession at a dinner party. Now he hopes that no one asks.

Winston Churchill once said he wanted to see “finance less proud and industry more content”.

Manufacturing is hardly content – the sector’s output is barely higher than it was in 2008 and a no-deal Brexit is an existential threat for some firms – but it’s certainly the case that finance has collapsed in esteem.

The popular mood on free markets in general has also been transformed over the past decade. Giving testimony to Congress in 2008 Alan Greenspan, with rather admirable honesty, admitted that he had “found a flaw” in his ideology of naturally self-policing, self-righting markets.

Now we can all see that flaw. “For my friends everything, for my enemies, the law,” said a Latin American president. In 2008, as the bailouts rolled out and unemployment soared, it was socialism for super-rich bankers and the market for the rest of us.

Well funded libertarian think tanks today preach the old religion of the untrammelled free market, privatisation and the rollback of the state, but like the Catholic church after Luther, the majesty is gone.

There are vanishingly few buyers among the general public.

The International Monetary Fund is something of a bellwether. In the 1990s it was a font of advice – even instruction – to developing countries: deregulate, privatise, financialise. This was the free market “Washington Consensus”.

Now the fund publishes research on how inequality damages growth; how there can be too much finance in an economy. It’s even recanted over its past “neoliberalism”.

What happened to our new deal?

“Never in the field of financial endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many,” was the verdict of the former Bank of England governor Mervyn King on the financial sector’s taxpayer-funded rescue.

But one of the stunning features of the crisis was not just how bankers managed to crash the entire global economy with their greed and recklessness and then get bailed out by the rest of society, but how much outright fraud and criminality in the sector has subsequently been uncovered.

The former UK regulator Bob Jenkins has counted more than 144 scandals, from interest-rate rigging, to insurance misselling, to money laundering. Banks worldwide have been fined more than $300bn since the crisis for such misdemeanours.

Some relatively low level traders have gone to jail. But what about their bosses? “If they knew, then they were complicit. If they did not, then they were incompetent,” says Jenkins.

But there’s been little personal accountability for the bosses of big banks. Goodwin lost his knighthood.

Dick Fuld, the boss of Lehman nicknamed “the gorilla of Wall Street”, hasn’t said a word in public in a decade. Many others have disappeared into quiet ignominy.

But as Warren Buffett says: “They went away rich. They may have been disgraced, but they went away rich. I don’t think the incentive system has been improved from what it was 10 years ago.”

Pay and bonuses in finance are still obscenely high, mainly because profits remain plump due to activities that another former UK regulator Adair Turner summed up as “socially useless”. But much of what finance does isn’t just useless, it’s positively harmful.

Like a parasite, it extracts money from households and businesses in the real economy in the form of extortionate fees for facilitating companies’ public fundraising. The Royal Bank of Scotland was accused of asset-stripping struggling small firms for profit. The official regulators’ report found systematic mistreatment of them.

Even with the neverending scandal sheet, there remains a captured branch of the media which still fawns on financiers, treating their opinions with reverence, as if 2008 was all just a bad dream.

And finance is still politically dominant in some respects, not least in the US. Trump railed against Wall Street on the campaign trail, accusing it of “getting away with murder”. But look at the reality in office. He filled his cabinet with ex-Wall Street financiers, including his treasury secretary and his chief economic adviser.

Even more alarming than the personnel is the policy. Trump’s Wall Street deregulation drive, including loosening rules on megabanks speculating, has gone under the public radar amid the president’s other scandals and affronts to decency.

Here in the UK, despite repeated efforts to encourage the big banks to ratchet up their lending to small businesses, they devote virtually all their balance sheets to financing residential mortgages and consumer credit. Aggregate household debt as a share of income, which collapsed in 2008, is growing again.

The Treasury’s desperate efforts to get the Royal Bank of Scotland back into private hands, even if it means crystallising a multibillion-pound loss for the taxpayer, shows how achingly conservative the political establishment remains when it comes to financial reform.

The idea of turning RBS into a network of state-owned banks to lend to small firms, along the lines of the highly successful German model, is apparently unthinkable to ministers and civil servants (although Labour has expressed an interest recently).

The global financial system is still far from safe mainly because true reform – vastly higher capital buffers and fully cleaving retail and investment banking – was dismissed in the years after the crisis as too disruptive and unnecessary.

In reality it was blocked by the vested interests of the financial industry. The sector still spends billions of dollars in the US lobbying Congress, just as it did before the fall of Lehman.

After the Wall Street Crash in 1929, the Pecora Commission, established by the Senate, rigorously exposed the top-to-bottom corruption of American finance. That investigation incensed the depression-struck US public and forced politicians to break up the giant banks and financial trusts of the day, notably cleaving the mighty old empire of John Pierpont Morgan in two.

The vigour of the past casts shame on our timid present. One of those two banks created in those 1930s structural reforms, JPMorgan, today has a balance sheet of $2.5 trillion dollars. That’s 12 per cent of the entire US economy. It’s also up $1 trillion on a decade ago.

The curse of “too big to fail” is still with us. So are its rewards. JPMorgan’s stridently anti-reform chief executive, Jamie Dimon, was paid $29.5m in 2017. Dimon gave an interview last week in which he boasted he could beat Trump in an election adding: “And by the way, this wealthy New Yorker actually earned his money.”

The difference between the 1930s and 2008 is that in 2008 politicians saved the financial system, averting what would have been a Great Depression-style social catastrophe. It was the only responsible decision they could have made. Yet it also generated a deadly complacency. It nourished the view that the old system was not truly broken, that we could go back.

Too many are still trying to jumpstart the old economic engine of ever accumulating consumer debt, super-profitable megabanks and industrial-scale financial speculation. After the calamity of the 1930s Roosevelt offered a “New Deal”. On finance today we’re been offered a revamped old deal.

Much has changed over the past decade in our economic life, in our politics, in our culture. But the hard reality is that, where it really matters, things haven’t changed nearly enough.

#WarrenBuffet #BenBernanke #JamieDimon #LehmanBrothers #AlanGreenspan #HankPaulson #financialcrisis

Free movement has worked well for the UK economy

Things are getting bleak when even non-partisan experts seem to be turning a blind eye to evidence.

Last week’s comprehensive report on European Union migration from the government’s independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) gave with one hand and took away with the other.

It did a splendid job of busting some entrenched myths about the economic impact of flows of EU migrants under freedom of movement.

No, EU migrants are not a drain on public services or the public finances. No, they do not discourage employers from offering training. No, they do not harm schools. They are not responsible for more crime.

There is a small negative impact of low-skilled EU migration on low-skilled UK wages but this is more than offset by other factors, not least the evidence that migrants seem to boost national productivity growth.

Such an authoritative overview would have been most welcome during the 2016 EU referendum campaign, when politicians sprayed the public with bogus claims about the adverse economic impact of free movement, often without media challenge.

As Jonathan Portes of King’s College London wrote for The Independent: “It is hard to overstate the significance of these findings. Immigration, overall, has made the UK a more productive economy and a more prosperous country – and can do so in the future.”

And yet the MAC’s chair, Professor Alan Manning, also recommended last week that a post-Brexit immigration system should cut off opportunities for low-skilled workers (including from the EU) to come to the UK, while throwing open the door to the high-skilled from everywhere in the world. “Low-skilled”, by the way, would effectively encompass those migrants who could only command a salary of below £ 30,000 a year, which is higher than the UK’s median.

This is strange because there is nothing in the evidence assembled by the MAC which seems to support this radical change of immigration policy from an economic perspective. While it finds that high-skilled migration is more economically beneficial, there is nothing presented which suggests low-skilled migration is, in any substantive way, harmful. The opposite in fact.

And the heavy reliance of some sectors on EU workers speaks for itself of the likely disruption of cutting off the supply. EU migrants account for 30 per cent of employees in food manufacturing, 16 per cent in warehousing, and 14 per cent of construction workers.

The Institute for Public Policy Research think tank has estimated that, under the regime advocated by the MAC, virtually all of the EU employees currently working in hotels and restaurants would have been ineligible to come here.

Nevertheless, the MAC’s policy advice seems to have strengthened the hands of the anti-EU free movement members of the government, including Theresa May. Reports suggest that cabinet ministers have concluded that this “high-skill yes, low-skill no” recommendation is roughly what they will target.

This isn’t final. Assuming there is no collapse in the Brexit talks before next March, talks will then begin, during the transition, on a free trade deal. The EU is very likely to ask for some continuation of work rights for all EU citizens in return for the kind of comprehensive agreement that the UK is shooting for.

And reports also suggest the cabinet accepts the need for some kind of “specific route” for low-skill worker migration from the EU to continue for heavily migrant-reliant sectors such as agriculture, social care and hospitality. The MAC report had only mooted a carve-out for agriculture.

Yet there’s something unsettling nonetheless about the general direction of travel set up by the MAC and the government.

Professor Manning seems oddly insouciant about the economic consequences of cutting off the supply of low-skilled labour to certain sectors, saying they are “not necessarily the parts of the UK economy that we want to be growing”.

This would hold more weight if the MAC had directly analysed the likely economic costs of government interfering with the forces of supply and demand for low-skilled labour. But it didn’t.

Jonathan Portes also points out that, despite the MAC report being impressively comprehensive in most dimensions, it did not commission work on how trade in goods and services and liberalised migration for work can be mutually supportive; an important subject in relation to EU free movement.

Yet one of the great virtues of science is that one need not draw the same conclusions from the data presented, or the evidence uncovered, as the particular scientist presenting it. One perfectly respectable conclusion from the empirical work marshalled by the MAC is that free EU movement is actually already working pretty well for the UK economy and that – Brexit or no Brexit – there is no case for scrapping it.

#AlanManning #freemovement #immigration #MigrationAdvisoryCommittee