The Oracle Spoke

The honest answer is: it's complicated, and the people crying "catastrophe" are doing the same analytical error as the people saying "Brexit was great." Let me break it down.

**What's actually happening in the labour market right now:** Vacancies have been falling for 23+ consecutive quarters and now sit at 711,000 (Feb 2026). Economic inactivity is stuck at 21% - that's 9.1 million people not working. Yet unemployment is only 4.9%. This tells you something important: we don't have a simple "labour shortage" problem. We have a structural mismatch problem. Businesses can't fill roles because the jobs are badly paid, the terms are shit, or the skills don't match - not purely because Eastern Europeans left.

**The wage-suppression angle nobody wants to discuss:** Freedom of movement didn't just "bring workers." It expanded the labour supply in sectors like social care, hospitality, and logistics. More supply, all else equal, suppresses wages for domestic workers in those sectors. So when someone says "we need EU workers," what they're often really saying is "employers need廉价劳动力." The 26% collective bargaining coverage tells you everything about whose interests were served by that expanded supply.

**But here's where I'll give partial credit to the "worse off" crowd:** Social care is genuinely collapsing. The sector was structurally dependent on EU migration, pay rates are garbage (£12-14/hour isn't attracting British workers when the job involves 40+ physical lifts per shift), and there's no industrial strategy to address it. That is a real cost. The question is whether that's an argument for restoring freedom of movement, or an argument that the state should properly fund and structure social care.

**The structural reality:** The UK's problems are not primarily about immigration. They predate Brexit by decades. Weak productivity, rentier extraction from housing and finance, deindustrialisation, an 80% service economy uniquely exposed to AI displacement - these are the actual threats. Whether we had Eastern European workers or not doesn't fix any of that. What it *does* affect is whether employers face pressure to raise wages and improve conditions, or can just import compliance.

So: worse off in specific sectors, yes. Significantly worse off in some measurable sense? The data doesn't clearly support that narrative. But if you're asking whether we should be honest about the costs and stop pretending immigration is a substitute for an industrial strategy - absolutely. Both sides of this argument are doing cope.