SUELLA BRAVERMAN’S speech on labour and immigration at the National Conservatism Conference points to contradictions at the heart of the current Tory Party.

Calling for Britain to train up people born here to carry out roles often occupied by foreign labour, she names “butchers, HGV drivers [and] fruit-pickers” as jobs we should stop relying on immigrants to do.

“Brexit enables us to build a high-skilled, high-wage economy that is less dependent on low-skilled foreign labour,” she declares.

The speech is framed as a defence of her brutal anti-immigration laws. But it is also a matter of internal Tory manoeuvres. The same contradiction between globalising finance capital and nativist nationalist tub-thumping that split the Tories down the middle over Brexit lurks beneath the surface; and the fact that both are of Indian heritage does not mean Braverman will miss an opportunity to boost her profile as the spokeswoman of the latter tendency against our plutocrat PM with his Californian residences.

Braverman’s speech is deeply contradictory. But that does not mean it will be ineffective. It was Boris Johnson’s promise of a “levelled up” Britain, with significant public investment in the regions and higher pay, that combined with Labour’s suicidal Brexit policy to deliver a Tory landslide in 2019. 

The left misjudged the public mood badly over Brexit. It needs to take on Braverman’s case and expose its inconsistencies.

That employers will try to use cheap imported labour to undercut wages is true. If they can avoid investing in training and poach pre-trained workers from elsewhere, companies will do that too.

In haulage, firms avoided training their own HGV drivers for decades, bringing in foreign drivers and forcing pay down. 

And a combination of labour shortages caused by Brexit and Covid-19, and leverage by haulage unions like Unite and URTU, have driven wages up in the sector in recent years. 

Unite has scored win after win, securing pay awards well above inflation for lorry drivers like last week’s 24 per cent increase for Morrison’s tanker drivers. A recent report in the Financial Times reported average wages rising by over 20 per cent since 2018. 

Tellingly, it also quoted disgruntled bosses reporting they had been “forced” to start training “home-grown” drivers — and noted that drivers’ pay was pushing up pay in related fields such as for mechanics. 

Braverman should be put on the spot. Because if she were honest about her call for a “high-wage economy” she would be saluting Unite’s achievements in haulage. 

She would be looking at the appalling conditions repeatedly exposed in British agriculture, where workers complain of being treated “like animals,” trapped in indentured labour through debt and effectively imprisoned in accommodation cut off from public transport links, and addressing them if she wants to encourage British citizens to apply for those jobs. 

She is not. The Tories’ claim to be in favour of a “high-wage” economy is a sick joke. They are holding pay well below inflation in the public sector. They are waging a vicious war against unions trying to achieve higher pay for their members and seeking to ban the right to strike because strikes are achieving higher pay. 

And her jibe about British workers forgetting how to do things for themselves comes from the old “Britannia Unchained” stable, deriding British workers as lazy because of low productivity when we work some of the longest hours in Europe — but are let down by a corporate refusal to invest or train that the Tories continue to facilitate.

Opposing the Tories’ revolting anti-immigrant politics means unpicking their deceitful claims to back British workers. 

Empower unions, raise pay, and stop companies undercutting each other through sectoral collective bargaining, and we will get that high-wage economy — and can welcome those who come to live here without incentivising callous bosses to ship in super-exploited labour.