Boris Johnson (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

Imagine Scott Morrison calling the policies of his own party of the past few years: “The same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity, all of it enabled and assisted by uncontrolled immigration.”

Imagine a senior minister warning business they weren’t going to go back to “being reliant on the addiction, if you like, of cheap, unskilled labour from abroad”.

Imagine Morrison promising to substantially lift the minimum wage.

Climate isn’t the only signal difference between Boris Johnson and his Tory UK government and Morrison’s clutch of right-wingers. Johnson is embarking on an economic program that combines nativism and a rejection of core neoliberal beliefs.

Australia is at a similar moment in its economic history as the UK, albeit for different reasons: both face the challenge of whether to reopen their labour markets to foreign labour. Here it’s because of our pandemic border closure; in the UK it’s the implementation of Brexit that means it is now facing the consequences of closing off access to labour from the European Union.

And Australia is governed by a party controlled by big business, with its obsession with high immigration and low wages, and a governing class convinced of the need to keep immigration running at high levels.

The Johnson Tory government, however, appears determined to keep out foreign labour shut out by Brexit, and remove access by EU citizens to employment.

The result is, according to the latest data from the UK Office of National Statistics, annual pay growth in the May-July quarter of between 3.6% and 5.1%. The uncertainty is because the British data series is affected by changes in job composition resulting from the pandemic, but even the smaller figure is more than twice Australia’s current wage price index growth of 1.7%, and is a small rise from the result from April-June.

The result is also a significant supply chain crisis due to a dearth of truck drivers — traditionally an industry that relied heavily on European workers given the integration of freight and logistics in the UK into European markets. With a hard border between the UK and the EU, and British wages unappealingly low, the UK has found itself without enough truck drivers, forcing Johnson to issue visas to attract European drivers and deploy the army to deliver fuel.

Other industries dependent on low-skill, foreign labour, such as animal slaughter, have also suffered (cue warnings of insufficient turkeys and Christmas hams). And in aged care, where Brexit-induced staff shortages are exacerbated by a lack of fully vaccinated staff, the industry is pleading for Johnson to add all care workers to the government’s “shortage visa” list and lower the wage level at which they’re allowed to bring in foreign workers — a literal demonstration of Deputy PM Dominic Raab’s complaint of business being addicted to “cheap, unskilled labour from abroad”.

Johnson’s response is that shortages and lack of workers are temporary and that employers will have to learn to pay British workers higher wages — a radical idea coming from a Tory prime minister, even one as unconventional as Johnson.

Johnson is ideologically incoherent — to be generous — and certainly no ardent free marketeer: “Fuck business” was one of his less classicist responses to business complaints about the impacts of Brexit.

He also has a deep political need to demonstrate that there is some benefit to the UK from Brexit. Having exploited the tribalism generated by neoliberal economics and open borders with the EU during the Brexit campaign, he’s now pursuing a “hermit kingdom” wages and immigration policy that flies directly in the face of the neoliberal imperative to enable the free flow of labour to keep wages suppressed — despite warnings from the usual suspects that curbing immigration would harm the UK economy.

And his government is remarkably sanguine about the impact of worker shortages and higher wages on inflation, which the Bank of England (BoE) expects to top 4% by the end of the year. Business Minister Kwasi Kwarteng said at the weekend that the BoE would “take a view” and aim to curb inflation, but that “we need to have a focus on higher wages”.

Such words uttered by a Labour politician would have been roundly denounced as paving the way for a reckless return to ’70s-style stagflation. It’s even more extraordinary coming from the party of Margaret Thatcher — who Johnson deliberately echoed when he declared at the Tory party conference recently that “there is no alternative” to a high-wage economy.

But it also suggests the Johnson government is fully committed to countenance not just a rise in inflation but a rise in interest rates — perhaps a significant one — in its efforts to boost wages. What has widely been seen as a temporary blip in inflation may indeed turn out to be longer term — and that’s exactly what his government is aiming at.

One response from the UK business community was to suggest that business be allowed to bring in whatever labour it needed, but pay the same as British workers and face an additional tax to make migrant workers more expensive than British workers — a “market-led solution”, according to the proponent, Tory peer Lord Wolfson. That in theory would create an incentive to avoid relying on immigrant labour — if industrial relations laws can be properly enforced.

As the Australian experience with low-skilled migrant workers shows, that’s easier assumed than accomplished.

Tomorrow: rising minimum wages and rising employment.