Starmer’s India Deal Sells Out British Workers

Britain’s new Indian trade deal imposes a two-tier tax system and increases immigration

 

CONNOR TOMLINSON

On Monday, Britain secured a long-negotiated trade deal with India, lowering tariffs to add a projected £4.8 billion a year to the UK economy. But it came as a surprise to ministers when the Indian government’s press release celebrated a tax exemption for their migrant workers on new “Skilled Worker” visas. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was said to have been “kept in the dark” about these concessions made by civil servants, whose hands hover over the wheel of our self-driving state. Just as Keir Starmer says he “gets it”, after voters punished his government at the local elections, he penalizes them with a two-tier tax system.

Indian nationals will be exempt from paying national insurance (pensions and healthcare) tax contributions for the 3-year duration of their visa. This follows Chancellor Rachel Reeves breaking a manifesto pledge in the last budget by raising employer-side national insurance contributions. Reeves’ tax rise will cause a projected 25% of British businesses to make redundancies or restrict new hires. British businesses are also no longer required to advertise roles in Britain to British workers first, thanks to Boris Johnson repealing the one good law passed by Gordon Brown. So, just as they raise the cost of employing British workers, the government incentivizes ethno-nepotistic hiring of cheap Indian labor from abroad. Although Labour argues that 17 other nations have existing tax-exempt temporary visa deals, the political optics remain catastrophic.

India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi said the deal will “catalyze trade, investment, growth, job creation, and innovation in both our economies”. But Modi knows he’s pulled a fast one, because few if any Brits will take up his offer to relocate to New Delhi. The promised £2.2 billion a year in wage growth will likely be exclusively for Indian immigrants — just as all private-sector employment growth was after Brexit. India was the largest beneficiary of UK visas in 2023 – 2024 (250,000), and the largest share of UK employment growth (+488,000) between 2021 – 2023. Hence why half of the annual >£9 billion outflow in remittances from Britain’s economy is to India. So integral are remittance services to Britain’s global-poor-box economy, that their tube adverts are part of an emerging “Yookay” aesthetic: alongside the halal-slaughtered animal carcasses, JD Sports tracksuits, and gibberish patois that make up the defaced mosaic of multicultural Britain. Modi’s government knew this, and so were cunning to make more fluid and frequent migration a non-negotiable in order for the deal to close.

This will be a net cost to British taxpayers too. Since Indian migration increased, Indians’ monthly median earnings have declined in real terms to less than that of their British counterparts. We are importing younger but less productive Indian nationals en masse, each of whom cost the taxpayer £465,000 minimum by age 81 (and that’s without considering their dependents). Labour doesn’t appear to have limited these 3-year worker visa recipients’ ability to switch to other visas (e.g. students) in order to extend their stay either. Most absurd of all are the new visas for Indian yoga instructors, musicians, and curry chefs — all jobs that Brits cannot do, of course. These visas will be capped at 1,800; but the number of other visas for which Indians are now eligible under the Global Business Mobility scheme has more than doubled, from 15 to 33. Liz Truss and Suella Braverman refused this request during the last Conservative government. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak didn’t have time to squish on it before calling the general election. Now, Labour intends to pack us to the rafters with cheap Indian labor.

We are importing younger but less productive Indian nationals en masse, each of whom cost the taxpayer £465,000 minimum by age 81 (and that’s without considering their dependents). Labour doesn’t appear to have limited these 3-year worker visa recipients’ ability to switch to other visas (e.g. students) in order to extend their stay either. Most absurd of all are the new visas for Indian yoga instructors, musicians, and curry chefs — all jobs that Brits cannot do, of course.

Obviously, the UK is not suffering from a dire shortage of vindaloo street-vendors. Sending sitar players to busk in London tube stations is not providing an economic boon to Britain; but rather a means for Modi’s Hindutva regime to export political influence. By establishing “living bridges” — demographic and cultural diasporas — in the Anglosphere, India can exert democratic pressure to their advantage. This is especially true in Britain, where, thanks to the British Nationality Act (1948) and Representation of the People Act (1983), citizens of Commonwealth countries such as India or Pakistan can vote in British elections. They do so with the help of British politicians. Parties code themselves as supporting one of the subcontinent’s competing ethnic voting blocks. At the last election, Conservative candidates pledged their support for sectarian Sikh and Hindu manifestos, and Labour pandered to Muslim interests. Meanwhile, a revolving door of Indian- and Pakistani-heritage politicians and civil servants oversaw (coincidental, I’m sure) record rises in immigrants from those regions. This decision will make Britain’s streets a febrile place, should tensions between the two countries continue to escalate after April’s Kashmir terror attack.

Purely economic arguments for or against the deal miss this forest through the Ganges. Those on the ostensible right praising it — Brexiteers including Steve BakerJacob Rees Mogg, and Lord Hannan — continue to make the fatal mistake of conflating free movement of goods with the free movement of people. While they extol the benefits of Britain exporting more scotch whisky to the ex-Raj, they are reticent about the demographic and cultural churn caused by the Boriswave. They treat Britain as the great machine into which all the world’s fungible cogs can seamlessly slot, rather than a home whose constituent members are irreplaceable. This worldview divide, between the Leave.EU Tories and now-Reform voters was why Brexit was betrayed by the Boriswave of 1.2 million annual third-world migrants, under the banner of “Taking Back Control”. But open borders with India was not “Exactly what Brexit promised” to the 73% of Leave voters whose principal concern was immigration. The Conservative party’s top brass might be having a love affair with Modi’s India, but those living with the consequences of rapid, unassimilable demographic change would like a clean split. The majority of the British public would rather see economic contraction than score another free-trade agreement at the expense of thousands more third-world migrants.

As for Hannan’s claim that “All the stories about Indian students being allowed to stay here for longer, or easier family reunification, or more visas, are sheer nonsense”: to my knowledge, Labour have not prohibited these 3-year working visas from being converted into another kind of visa (e.g. student) either. This is a common practice: with up to 25% of Indian and Bangladeshi student visa recipients dropping out in their first year to disappear into the low-wage Deliveroo gig-economy. India is not on the rumored “Red List” of countries in an upcoming immigration white-paper, whose students are prevented from claiming asylum in Britain when their visas expire. By switching to another visa, these new “Skilled Workers”, already a net-cost to the taxpayer, could extend their stay until they are eligible to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain. After that, they can receive state benefits, social housing, and a state pension. The bill for the existing Boriswave gaining Indefinite Leave to Remain is already estimated to be £234 billion — or £8,000 per taxpaying household. Starmer just added thousands more potential applicants, while imposing National Insurance rises on businesses hiring British workers.

Britain’s political establishment has predictably sold out its settled host majority again, in pursuit of globalist buzzwords like “international cooperation” and crumbs (0.168%) of GDP growth. New ONS net-migration numbers are released on 22 May. If Sir Keir condemned the Conservatives’ attempt to “turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders”, then donned his lab-coat to continue opening our doors to India, we may soon see the coinage of a “Starmerwave”. But no matter who’s to blame, Britain’s hard-working, home-loving taxpayers will continue picking up the bill. At least they’ll have some cheap socks to keep them warm when they can’t afford to put the heating on.


This article (STARMER’S INDIA DEAL SELLS OUT BRITISH WORKERS) was created and published by Courage Media and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Connor Tomlinson

See Related Article Below

This India Free Trade Agreement punishes working Brits

MIGRATION WATCH UK

The proposed free trade agreement with India that will allow Indians working in this country to avoid paying National Insurance is a betrayal of hard-working Brits who pay their taxes and will now foot the bill for foreign nationals.

This is the crux of the matter: it burdens British workers even more. The agreement includes something called a “Double Contributions Convention” that the government has said means workers “will only be liable to pay social security contributions in one country at a time”.

What this means in reality is that Indian nationals will be able to avoid paying national insurance, and instead pay directly to the Indian social security system. is clearly designed to benefit Indian migrants in Britain and not the other way around. There are over 1.8 million Indian nationals in Britain, while there is no clear data on how many British nationals live in India.

Moreover, Indian nationals will benefit from the lower Employee Provident Fund (EPF) of 12%, compared to the British 15% National Insurance Contribution (NIC). Indian workers will be able to benefit from the higher British salaries and the lower Indian social security payments, leaving British workers to pay for the increased cost of yet more migrants in the country.

All trade deals carry a price and this one is no exception. India has for years pressed for looser visa rules for its nationals and it seems at least some of those demands have been met with this deal. More work permits will be issued to Indians – 81,000 were handed out last year – taking the number of Indians in the UK over two million. This flies in the face of the government’s promise to reduce immigration from its catastrophically high levels.

We have warned for a long time that trade deals with India need to be viewed with scepticism. We pointed out that the EU trade deal with India that was pursued in 2010 was likely to blow a hole in our immigration controls, due to there being no limit on numbers and the likelihood of undercutting native workers’ wages.

Thankfully this was avoided thanks to Brexit, but the subsequent rise in numbers of non-EU migrants and the government introducing an artificial goal of 600,000 foreign students per year (of which India is a main recipient) has seen our immigration numbers explode.

Not only this, but our visa system is being completely exploited – especially by Indians. Our ‘Intra-Company Transfer’ (ICT) Visa which was uncapped and in the IT sector at least was issued almost exclusively to Indian nationals – for example, of the 8,940 IT business analysts who came here in 2017, 93% went to Indians. This matters because the ICT visa and now the Senior or Specialist Worker (SSW) Visa has consistently proven to be a route to long term migration, as well as seriously undercutting the wages of native British workers.

The reality is we are now likely to see even greater numbers of Indian workers coming to this country, forcing greater competition onto native workers, and then paying their social security back to India. Any economic benefit this so-called “free trade deal” might generate will evaporate just as quickly.

Illegal Migration

The number of small-boat crossings this year is out of control. Can anyone seriously say this is sustainable? That one-third of the way through the year, we have exceeded 2018, 2019, and 2020’s number of illegal immigrants arriving via small boats combined?

X Posts (formerly “Tweets”) of the week

Nick Timothy put together a great thread on the Indian government’s perspective on the trade deal, especially on how they see it changing Britain’s immigration policies.

Watch an excellent interview between Tony Smith CBE on ‘Spiked on how we’ve lost control of our borders.

The new Reform MP for Runcorn and Helsby speaking lots of sense with Mike Graham. She confirms what many of us have long suspected.

And we really recommend this interview with Paul Collier about the impact of immigration on London, who cannot think of any other “major city where the indigenous population has more than halved in half a century.” It’s just as true of Birmingham, Leicester, and soon more.

We also liked this straightforward, clear explanation from Tony Smith, former Border Force head, about what needs to be done to stop the boats. Readers will be aware that Tony’s take is not a million miles from Migration Watch’s.

SOURCE: Migration Watch UK newsletter

Featured image: x.com

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