Immigration to save our bacon

The widespread public opposition to immigration in Britain is something that will have to be tackled, sooner rather than later, by the major political parties.

With our rapidly ageing population and consequently shrinking workforce, and with all the future demands on the healthcare system and pensions, Britain is going to need a consistent influx of immigrants ready and willing to do the work, be entrepreneurs and drive innovation.

Together, this might just provide the wealth creation (and therefore taxation) to sustain our old folk (and our young) in the style to which we have become accustomed.

(I notice that the annual Fiscal Sustainability Report of the Office for Budget Responsibility, out yesterday, has lots of tables and graphs demonstrating all this.)

To block immigration at this juncture would seem to be next door to suicidal.

Or have I missed something?

Creating wealth: getting back to basics

Lunch yesterday with an old friend, the brilliant Australian winemaker, Julian Castagna (left).

He has always been uncompromising in his pursuit of excellence – that’s why his wines are so highly regarded. In recent years he has pioneered the introduction in upstate Victoria of traditional Italian grape varieties to Australia – a market still swamped by shiraz and chardonnay.

We reminisced about a campaign we worked on together (in previous lives) in the late 1970s for the Institute of Directors in London. We’d been hired by the then Director-General, Jan Hildreth, to communicate to the Great British Public that, in order to pay for public services – education, health, defence etc – the taxes that paid for them were only generated from continuously created wealth. And that the only way to create wealth was to sell goods and services profitably.

We didn’t pursue the project when Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative Party co-opted the thinking into the core of its 1979 campaign – the one that swept her into power – and then into all the changes that kick-started the British economy again through the 1980s.

I keep thinking that we might usefully resurrect it now. People do seem to have lost the plot again, not least our Conservative/Lib Dem government in Britain. They appear to know that getting the economy moving ahead is top priority.

But liberalising the planning laws as the main event? I don’t think so. The answers lie in substantially greater incentivisation and reduced bureaucracy for entrepreneurs and innovators.