Kwarteng says low-wage employers resisting post-Brexit change
The Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Kwasi Kwarteng made the comments in an interview with Conservative Home – a blog that supports the Conservative party.
The Secretary of State was asked about the fuel shortage and whether the ‘road haulage people’ and others were using the petrol crisis and public pressure to resist the post-Brexit drive towards a ‘different economic model of higher wages and lower immigration’.
Kwarteng said: “That’s absolutely right, and I’ve said this a number of times, certainly privately. The reason why constituencies like mine [Spelthorne] voted decisively for Brexit, 60 per cent to 40 per cent, was precisely this issue.
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“I remember three weeks before the referendum in 2016, I came out of Staines station and someone came up to me and said ‘I’m voting for Brexit.’
“And I said, ‘Oh, why are you doing that?’
“And he said, ‘Well I haven’t had a wage increase in 15 years,’ and he was someone who worked in the building trade, lots of people do work, certainly in my constituency, in that kind of self-employed, small business, logistics, construction world.
“And that was in his mind what this was all about. And so, having rejected the low-wage, high-immigration model, we were always going to try to transition to something else.
“What we’re seeing now is part of that transition. You’re quite right to say people are resisting that, particularly employers that were benefiting from an influx of labour that could keep wages low.
“I think this is a transition period. As economists would describe, between Equilibrium A and Equilibrium B there’s always going to be a transition period.”
