12 ★ FT Weekend 22 February/23 February 2020Opinion
examination. “Come to Britain and your
spouse can pick cherries — is that really
the message that Global Britain wants to
give?” asks Joe Owen, programme direc-
tor at the Institute for Government.
The worst case for the government
would be that its rules increased compe-
tition for British skilled workers just as
wages were rising above inflation, while
hitting growth in parts of the economy
dependent on low-skilled labour — not
least the construction industry, central
to its plans for road, rail and housing.
For all its desire for simple rules, that is
why there are likely to be more exemp-
tions as the impact becomes clearer.
That would be a good thing. Immigra-
tion is one of the main ways the UK
interacts with the rest of the world. The
effects are hard to calculate and rules
need to evolve. The economy will suffer
if ideology trumps flexibility.
The main lesson from the past is that
this is a tricky area in which predictions
often are wrong. If you cannot predict
the future, then leave yourself room to
react to it.The writer is director of the Institute for
Government, a think-tankrecently been sluggish, employment
levels are very high.
The loudest complaint about Ms
Patel’s announcement has been that
sectors reliant on low-skilled workers
would be hard hit — not just agriculture,
but catering, hospitals and social care.
Some businesses will be able to invest in
technology to replace workers, but this
takes time and is rarely the case in care
for the elderly. Yet the home secretary
has said that in the interests of simplic-
ity, the government does not want lots of
sectoral exemptions.
Most derision has been reserved for
Ms Patel’s assertion that the new rules
will be an opportunity for 8.48m “eco-
nomically inactive” British people
between 16 and 64 to join the workforce.
The Office for National Statistics esti-
mates that 2.3m of those are students,
2.1m are long-term sick and disabled,
1.9m are looking after their family or
home, 1.1m are retired and 160,000 are
temporarily sick. There are only 1.87m
who would like a job and do not have
one, it reckons.
Nor does the home secretary’s notion
that spouses of skilled immigrants
can do unskilled work bear closelowered from the current £30,000 to
£25,600 — and to £20,480 in sectors
with shortages. Crucially, the present
cap on the number of visas for skilled
workers is abolished. However, for
unskilled labour, there is no other appli-
cation route; for agriculture, where
there are shortages, there will be a cap.
If the rules stay as set out this week,
they would undoubtedly tilt immigra-
tion towards more skilled workers. At
least that would be the effect on legal
migration, although they might encour-
age illegal migration. Those arguing for
the benefit of immigration to the econ-
omy say that an influx of comparatively
young, educated workers can be of con-
siderable help to growth.
Beyond that, however, the rules are
full of potential pitfalls for the govern-
ment. It is notoriously hard to estimate
what the effect on total numbers would
be. There might well be a jump in the
number of skilled workers as Migration
Watch UK, a group lobbying for lower
migration, has warned — hence the
Indian media’s spin.
Immigration is hard to predict, not
least because the “pull factor” depends
on economic growth. While growth hasI
ndians stand to benefit as Priti Patel
unveils new points-based immigra-
tion system.” That was the headline
in the Times of India this week, as
the UK home secretary set out new
rules which are set to be among the most
consequential changes this government
will make.
That headline is just one sign that
there will be winners as well as losers
from the much-criticised changes, and
that some kinds of immigration may go
up under the new rules, even if that is
the opposite of what the government
appears to intend. However, business
leaders have warned that parts of the
economy will be hard hit by labour
shortages if the new rules come
abruptly into force on December 31,
when the Brexit transition period ends.
This policy is driven above all by poli-
tics. Its effects are, at this point, impossi-
ble to calculate. The government would
be well advised to build in room for itself
to make further changes as it plunges
the nation into this experiment.
The motivation for the new system
lies in Brexit itself. For one kind of Brex-
iter, including some of those now in the
cabinet, “taking back control” of the
UK’s borders was synonymous with
controlling immigration. Resentment of
freedom of movement within the EUhad fuelled the Brexit vote, ministers
deduced; when the government won a
hefty majority in December, they vowed
to do something about it.
Hence Ms Patel’s announcement on
Wednesday — made while parliament
was in recess, suggesting the govern-
ment wanted maximum attention with
a minimum of challenge. While it has
avoided setting a target for the annual
number of immigrants (of the kind that
tripped up former prime minister David
Cameron), the aim, Ms Patel said, was to
“move away” from relying on cheap
labour from Europe and “encourage
people with the right talent” to move to
the UK.
The new rules adopt, in part, an Aus-
tralian-style “points-based” system,
treating EU and non-EU applicants the
same. For skilled workers, the educa-
tion threshold is lowered from the
present requirement of a university
degree to A-level or equivalent. Speak-
ing English and having a job with an
“approved sponsor” would get them 50
of the required 70 points; they could
score more points through other qualifi-
cations or working in a sector deemed to
have shortages. The salary threshold isThe home secretary’s
proposals are fullof potential pitfalls
for the country
Britain could hurt its prospects by
being inflexible on immigration
Government’s new rules threaten those parts of the economy dependent on low-skilled labour
O
nWednesday afternoon, I
and thousands of other
Manchester City support-
ers should have been fret-
ting about that evening’s
Premier League match against West
Ham. Would the French defender
Aymeric Laporte be fit enough to play?
Might manager Pep Guardiola give in to
popular demand and select the fans’
favourite, and local lad, Phil Foden?
But rather than preoccupying our-
selves with such trifles, we obsessed
instead about the latest news emanating
from Nyon in Switzerland, home to
Uefa, the governing body of European
football. A few days earlier, Uefa had
announced its intention to ban City
from the Champions League for two
seasons after “serious breaches” of
so-called financial fair play (FFP) rules.After news of the sanction broke on
Friday, City rushed out a response. The
club said it was “disappointed but not
surprise d” by the de cision. It
denounced Uefa’s investigation as “prej-
udicial”, largely on account of its reli-
ance on leaked emails and documents
obtained by the German magazine Der
Spiegel, and gave notice that it would
seek an “impartial judgment” at the
Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Those emails, which allegedly show
that City had inflated the value of spon-
sorship deals with undeclared funding
from its owner, Sheikh Mansour bin
Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the Abu
Dhabi royal family, do not present the
club in an especially flattering light.
I’d rather not have to think about this
stuff, and much prefer debating the
merits of inverted full-backs and high
pressing to parsing the deliberations of
Uefa’s Club Financial Control Body.
Many of my fellow fans, however, seem
entirely untroubled by the revelations
and have fallen in squarely behind the
senior management.
One self-styled expert on the financial
and political aspects of football tweeted:
“Goodbye & good riddance Uefa. Seeyou in court. Hope you’ve got deep
pockets. This is a fight to the death now.”
There was reams of this stuff on sup-
porters’ message boards and Twitter.
These were the same people who, in
2018, had revealed a hitherto well-dis-
guised familiarity with the politics of
Catalan separatism when Mr Guardiola
was charged by the Football Association
for wearing a yellow ribbon signalling
his support for that cause.I’ve always cringed when the chant of
“Sheikh Mansour, m’lord, Sheikh
Mansour” goes up at City games. His
acquisition of the club in 2008 certainly
ushered in an era of unprecedented
success, during which City have played
some of the best football I have ever
seen. But it seems to me a category error
to suppose that supporting the “club” or
the “team” entails an unblinkingindifference to the entanglement of
City’s on-field fortunes with Abu Dhabi’s
projection of soft power.
But set aside for a moment these geo-
political ramifications, and the question
of whether City really did break the
rules. And consider instead the other leg
of the legal strategy that the club is now
likely to follow. This will seek to show
that FFP is anti-competitive and
entrenches the power of incumbents —
clubs such as Real Madrid and Bayern
Munich, which have long regarded City
as an unwelcome threat to their historic
dominance of the European game.
Stefan Szymanski, co-author ofSoc-
cernomics, a study of the business of
football, says that “doing a City” — when
a wealthy owner makes a substantial
investment in a club — is good for the
sport. Now, Prof Szymanski’s research
reveals a close correlation between
spending on players’ wages and a club’s
league position. But the effect of FFP’s
“break even” rule, which requires clubs
to balance expenditure with revenues, is
to limit the ability of owners to invest in
their teams, even when they have the
means to do so.
Former Arsenal manager ArsèneWenger is fond of charging City, and
other insurgents such as Qatari-owned
Paris Saint-Germain, with “financial
doping”. But, as Prof Szymanski points
out, the analogy is inexact.
An athlete using performance-
enhancing drugs tries to hide his or her
subterfuge. But before the introduction
of FFP, clubs like City (or oligarch-
backed Chelsea, for that matter) did not
conceal the income they received from
their wealthy owners. It’s Uefa’s obses-
sion with financial “sustainability” that
creates a perverse incentive to do so.
Simon Chadwick, director of the
Centre for the Eurasian Sport Industry
in Lyon, told PA this week that the
stakes in this case could not be higher.
This is “transnational power vs localised
governance”, he said.
It’s all a far cry from the early 1990s,
when we City fans were mesmerised by
a battle for control of the club that pitted
Peter Swales, a local businessman who
ran a chain of TV rental shops, against
Francis Lee, a former player who’d
made a modest fortune in the waste
paper business.[email protected]Uefa’s obsession with
financial ‘sustainability’limits the ability of owners
to invest in their teams
Why Manchester City’s punishment does not fit the crime
I
sometimes wonder if there is any
moment when I am not thinking —
at least subconsciously — about
Donald Trump. It’s one of the sad-
nesses of modern life. I find myself
trying to rationalise his latest disregard
for the rule of law, or pondering the
ridiculously precise percentage that the
US statistician Nate Silver has given
Michael Bloomberg of winning the
Democratic primary. My brain is like a
laptop slowed down by malware perpet-
ually running in the background.
Last Friday, I found refuge. I went to
watch the South Korean filmParasite. It
was Valentine’s Day. What could be
more romantic than a thoughtful,
Oscar-winning film, which, erm,
descends into a murderous rampage in
its final quarter. For two hours, I wasn’t
aware of Mr Trump; I wasn’t even aware
that I wasn’t aware of him. When he par-
doned various felons this week, I
thought: we’ll always haveParasite.
It didn’t last. Yesterday, I woke up to
find that the president had an opinion
aboutParasite. Of course he did. If the
Chinese government could shut down
coronavirus as quickly as Mr Trump can
shut down joy, the world would need
many fewer hospital beds. My Valen-
tine’s evening had become just another
skirmish in the culture war.
Mr Trump’s complaint was thatPara-
sitehad won the Oscar for best picture.
“What the hell was that all about?” he
told a rally in Colorado. “We got enough
problems with South Korea with trade.
On top of it, they give them the best
movie of the year?... Can we get like
Gone with the Windback please?Sunset
Boulevard? So many great movies.”
A reminder: one Democratic candi-
date, Pete Buttigieg, bothered to learn
Norwegian in order to read a novelist in
his original language. Mr Trump won’t
bother to read subtitles. I’m sure he likessome foreign films, albeit the ones that
don’t have much dialogue and shouldn’t
be accessed from an office computer.
Mr Trump needs to be careful about
imposing English language require-
ments in the US, because he would prob-
ably fail them. Nonetheless, it’s nice to
hear the president speak out against for-
eigners’ reach into American institu-
tions. Such a principle might be useful
in, say, a presidential election.
Perhaps he would have been happier
ifParasitehad come from North Korea,
which he once claimed, “under the
leadership of Kim Jong Un, will become
a great Economic Powerhouse”. Then
again, he used to like South Korea too. In
2017, Mr Trump visited Seoul and
tweeted: “Thank you to President Moon
of South Korea for the beautiful
welcoming ceremony. It will always be
remembered.” Update: it was not.
Congratulations to the president for
insulting one of the few countries
where he is not already overwhelming
unpopular.
Parasite’s US distributor, Neon, had a
simple yet beautiful comeback to Mr
Trump’s criticism: “Understandable, he
can’t read.” But there’s a missed oppor-
tunity. What if the president could
watchParasite? What if he managed to
get over what the film’s director Bong
Joon-ho has called “the one-inch barrier
of subtitles”? As the director put it: “We
all live in the same country now: that of
capitalism” and “we use only one lan-
guage: the cinema”.
The film is a story of inequality, of
how the poor are not less deserving or
less ingenious than the rich. That should
resonate with the president, who, asked
to explain “white trash”, reportedly
once said, “they’re people just like me,
only they’re poor”.
But the movie also asks, who are soci-
ety’s real parasites — the rich or the
poor? That question should certainly
resonate with Mr Trump, given the
skewed tax cuts he championed. Alter-
natively, the president might just enjoy
the massacre scenes. It doesn’t matter
what he keeps fromParasite, as long as it
keeps him quiet for 130 minutes. Please,
Mr President, MAGA — Make America
Go Away (for a bit).[email protected]Trump shows
the world
who is the real
‘Parasite’
My Valentine’s evening
became just anotherskirmish in the
US president’s culture war
SPORT
Jonathan
Derbyshire
POLITICS
Bronwen
Maddox
SOCIETY
Henry
Mance
FEBRUARY 22 2020 Section:Features Time: 21/2/2020 - 18: 18 User: alistair.hayes Page Name: COMMENT2, Part,Page,Edition: LON, 12 , 1