‘Not the Brexit I wanted’ says Next boss – but what did Lord Wolfson expect?

Wolfson says he wanted an open, free-trading Britain post-Brexit. But many Brexit backers made it quite clear they wanted the drawbridge pulled up, writes James Moore

Lord Wolfson, boss of retail giant Next (PA)

I think in respect of immigration, it’s definitely not the Brexit that I wanted or indeed many of people who voted Brexit wanted.” So said the Brexiteer Next boss and Tory peer Simon Wolfson.

Forgive us, but exactly what was it he was expecting from Brexit? He is not stupid, far from it; he is one of Britain’s sharpest businessmen, running a highly successful retailer in a brutally competitive sector that has seen multiple casualties among its peers.

But he sure seems to have blinded himself to the nature of the campaigning for the political outcome he supported. The official leave campaign might have distanced itself from some of the more extreme propaganda put out by the Farageists, such as the now infamous “breaking point” poster.

You may remember that it featured a queue of mostly non-white refugees and that it looked disturbingly like some of the Nazi wartime propaganda directed at Jewish people. I do not say that at all lightly. But it seems to me that the official campaign’s messaging wasn’t all that different in tone.

Remember Michael Gove’s claim that staying in the EU would increase the UK population by 5.23m by 2030? Based on the idea that a flood of migrants was poised to enter from new EU members such as Turkey, Albania, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia?

It was equally cynical and based on a blatant falsehood: the most optimistic assessment of Turkey’s prospects of joining the bloc at the time put it at decades away, if ever. Nor was there any firm date for the accession of the others. There was also the small matter of Britain’s veto. None of this stopped Gove and his friends. Ads making similar claims flooded social media.

Did Wolfson think the rhetoric would be quietly dropped when the day was won? In favour of creating some sort of some buccaneerin’ free tradin’ low regulation Singapore-on-Thames? If so, he was being incredibly naive. His statement does rather sum up one of the many problems with Brexit: its supporters were sharply divided on what they wanted from it.

Some of their ideas were never going to work in practice. An example of that would be the cohort that genuinely seemed to think that it could achieve most or all of the benefits of membership without the inconvenient obligations such as free movement.

However, there was also a substantial proportion of Brexit backers who had no interest in Wolfson’s idea of an open free trading nation. They were quite clear about wanting the drawbridge pulled up. The Tory government has been pandering to them ever since.

Lord Wolfson is correct in his assessment that this is dragging down the British economy and that the hardline stance of the Suella Bravermans of this world is ultimately self-defeating.

For example, fruit has been left rotting in the fields, a point he referenced in his interview with the BBC. And Britain’s shortage of agricultural labour has led to some absurd statements from his fellow Tories; Dominic Raab, while serving as deputy prime minister to Boris Johnson, once mooted getting prisoners to do the job. Young Britons were told to go out into the fields by hectoring Tories who wouldn’t dream of dragging their own children out of their private schools to get their hands dirty.

Meanwhile, the government is well aware that health and social care would collapse without foreign workers, which is why it has been a little more open to granting visas to suitable candidates in these sectors.

But it has proved much less interested in paying heed to the pleas of businesses such as Next even though their problems are acute. The CBI has produced figures showing that 75 per cent of UK companies have suffered labour shortages over the past 12 months.

The two-year recession the Bank of England has forecast will inevitably be accompanied by a rise in unemployment. The looser labour market that will create will inevitably paper over some of the cracks. But by no means all.

The eventual recovery may very well leave us in the same place. Demographic pressures will only exacerbate the problem. Britain has an ageing population. It isn’t going to be able to fund care for it on the backs of a diminishing number of young people who’ve already been stiffed through bearing the brunt of successive waves of austerity.

Maybe they’ll start to vote. They did in America and turned the expected red Republican wave into a trickle. There’s something for the Tories to think about there.

Wolfson’s favoured immigration fix is to allow companies like his to hire overseas workers while paying a levy for doing so. His thinking is clearly that this would blunt the accusation that they were somehow taking jobs from Britons because it would be in employers’ interest to hire cheaper domestic workers. It is an interesting idea. Trouble is, the Home Office is where interesting ideas go to die.

The British government’s current hostility towards immigration is holding the nation back economically and may do worse than that in the future. One unequivocally welcome part of Wolfson’s interview was his recognition that those who did not back Brexit should have a say in the future.

“We have to remember, you know, we’re all stuck in this Brexit argument, we have to remember that what post-Brexit Britain looks like is not the preserve of those people that voted Brexit. It’s for all of us to decide,” he said.

Sentiments like that from a Brexiteer have proved vanishingly rare. So perhaps we could do with hearing more from the Next CEO on this subject, even if it is somewhat galling to listen to his buyer’s remorse given how clear the direction of travel of so many of his fellow Brexiteers has always been.