
Behind the headlines
The real winners of the West’s migration crisis
Lord Wolfson, chief executive of the fashion giant Next, recently complained about the lack of cheap labour to staff the 5am shifts at his warehouses. Before Brexit, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph, he could simply “pick up the phone to an agency in Gdansk”, fly over as many Polish workers as needed, and pay them close to minimum wage. Not any more. Wolfson is one of many employers who “have become addicted to importing, rather than training, workers”. In Rotherham – not far from a Next warehouse advertising vacancies – some 16% of the working-age population are on out-of-work benefits. The figure tops 20% in cities like Birmingham, Glasgow and Liverpool; in total, there are five million Brits on these payouts. “No wonder GDP has stalled.” If the government did more to help these people get healthy and acquire the necessary skills, “at least a million” of them could rejoin the labour force.