Why stamp duty doesn’t add up

‘Blame it all on business’ was the Tory strategists’ answer to petrol queues and the risk of a no-turkey Christmas that threatened to distract the party-conference faithful from adulation of the Prime Minister. As spin, it might have been shocking if it wasn’t so familiar. But as an explanation of the supply crisis, the idea that business has been deaf to years of warnings that it could no longer rely on immigrant labour is hogwash, rivalled only by the proposition that spiralling wages will lead us to a fairer society — rather than contributing to a bout of uncontrolled inflation in which higher pay actually buys fewer goods because all prices are rising.

The answer to all this lies in one word, productivity, in which the UK’s record is lamentably weak. Productive companies employ more robots and computers but fewer people — for whom higher wages are then justifiable. Yet Tory ministers have, until recently, celebrated the news that UK firms were creating more and more low-wage jobs, many taken up by immigrants, because an expanding workforce and a low unemployment rate looked so good in the headlines.