How will Boris build his ‘high-wage, high-skill’ Britain?

There are a few problems with Boris Johnson’s big idea, namely that the sharp fall in the supply of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the UK – triggered by Brexit, reinforced by Covid – will automatically lead businesses to invest, such that the UK’s long history of low productivity and low incomes will end on his watch.

His vision, the philosophical heart of his speech to Tory conference this morning, is of a gleaming new ‘high wage, high skill, high productivity economy’ and that ‘we are not going back to the same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity, all of it enabled and assisted by uncontrolled immigration’.

It is important to note his stress on controlling immigration. This is obviously politics he likes, because so much of his case for taking the UK out of the EU was about regaining the power to decide who comes to live and work in the UK.