So the English want protection against the superior abilities of others

If all the citizens of other EU member states who are now living in Britain are thrown out of the country, the British economy will collapse overnight. This is the spectre looming over all arguments about what is to become of those people, but with the political parties in tatters, nobody is able or willing to come right out and say that.

In London alone, there are ONE MILLION citizens of other EU member states. What are the consequences of expelling from the country, in one fell swoop, one million people in the capital city alone, all of whom are filling jobs and rented accommodation, and spending their salaries? Well, exactly. Disaster and chaos.

But that’s just one aspect of it. Many of the Leave voters interviewed on television have been shameless in using the ‘they take our jobs’ argument. Their economic ignorance is shocking. In most cases, those jobs only exist because there are immigrants to take them. If there were no immigrants, the jobs would not be there either. To illustrate this, just draw a simple comparison with the situation in Malta. The thousands of other EU citizens working in internet gaming and other businesses and industries are not here taking the jobs of Maltese people. Those jobs have been created only because employers were able to fill them with citizens of other EU member states. There simply aren’t enough Maltese people with the skills to fill them. There aren’t enough Maltese people, full stop.

The ‘take our jobs’ argument is completely fallacious whichever level of the job market you’re looking at. If it’s low-level unskilled jobs, then booting out the EU citizens who are prepared to wait tables and clean offices for low wages – jobs the English don’t want – will result in supply of labour shrinking relative to demand, wages being forced up, and business growth slowing as the wage bill increases while recruitment levels drop, with some businesses closing down altogether.

The higher up the scale you go, where the push-pull on wages becomes irrelevant, other serious factors come into play. At that level, businesses, organisations and institutes are primarily interested in finding the best person for the job. This is not the same thing as finding the best British person for the job. Employers and interview boards at that level don’t care whether the applicant is British, French, German or Maltese. They care only whether their business, organisation or institute is going to get the best able person to contribute towards their goals and objectives.

British businesses, organisations and institutes have been doing so much better over the last few years precisely because their recruitment pool has been so much larger that they have been able to recruit the people they really want and need for the jobs they have got to fill at higher levels. Of course, they have not been only EU citizens. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England (the country’s central bank) is Canadian. He was chosen because he was the best available person for the job.

When British employers select a Maltese or a French person for a job at a higher level, they don’t do so on the basis of lower wages (they receive a salary, and salaries don’t work like wages). Nor do they say, “Hmmm, this person is Maltese, and I really like Maltese people. I’ll give him/her the job because Maltese people are lovely.”

As anybody who has been through the experience, or who has sons and daughters who have been through the experience, will tell you, there are many hundreds of applicants for jobs beyond a certain level, and the competition is fierce. Very few people are selected for the start of an interview process, from among the hundreds of applicants, and then there is one interview after another until the number is whittled down to two or three, then one. As things stand, British people have to complete on an equal basis with everybody else. If a Maltese person beats hundreds of British applicants for the job, it’s obviously because the Maltese person was the best for that job and he or she is the one the business, organisation or institute wants for its purposes.

What many English people and English politicians (and yes, it is English as distinct from British) are saying now, effectively, is that British operations should not be allowed to choose the best person for their purposes, but only the best BRITISH person for their purposes. This has a direct, negative effect on the ability of those British operations to further their objectives.