Theresa May received some harsh criticism for saying that, after Brexit, EU immigrants to the UK would no longer be able to “jump the queue”, language she conceded on Monday she should “not have used”.
But more revealing than her queue-jumping remark is what else the prime minister said when she addressed the CBI employers’ group last week, because it exemplifies a widespread British attitude not just to immigration, but to the jobs people do.
Those EU queue-jumpers, she said, had been elbowing aside “engineers from Sydney or software developers from Delhi”. This is part of her long-term boast that Brexit would allow the UK to control its own immigration policy, opening itself to “the brightest and the best”.