Vegetables are rotting in the fields for want of Eastern European pickers, patients are being left untreated thanks to a haemorrhaging of EU nurses, our universities are in peril as European academics flee from a xenophobic Britain which no longer wants them.
That, at least, is the picture that is continually presented to us by the rearguard Remain lobby, which wants us to think that the EU nationals who make our economy go round have had enough and, as the Guardian says of nurses and midwives, are ‘leaving in droves’.
There is one problem with this analysis: it is directly contradicted by the facts. Figures released by the Office of National Statistics yesterday show that in the third quarter of this year there were 2.38 million EU nationals working in Britain – a rise of 112,000 on the same period a year earlier.
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