What happens in a country that has insufficient inward migration and a massively declining birth rate (as many, including the UK, are now at risk of having)? The FT has the answer in the case of Japan's skill crisis this morning, where they note:
Take carpenters — essential in a country where a great deal of construction uses wood. Their numbers have more than halved since 2020, while more than 43 per cent of those still working are over 65. Many projects, large and small, are being delayed.
A shortage of bus drivers has caused operators in Tokyo to cut over 200 services.
The military cannot get close to its recruitment targets.
The Foreign Ministry revealed earlier this year that it cannot hire enough Japanese chefs for its embassies.
In some parts of the countryside, home deliveries of certain goods are undertaken by scooter riders in their mid-80s.
There are genuine concerns across industry that companies are going to run into trouble because Japan no longer has enough tax accountants.
That is what happens: the economy threatens to grind to a halt.
AI is not going to solve this.
Nor will migration in the short term in a country with a language that is fiendishly difficult for an outsider to learn.
The reality is that Japan is in a mess as a result. So, too, will we be without serious levels of controlled inward migration into this country.
Forget the thugs, the populists, the racists and the bullies. The reality is that without those coming to the UK from outside, we have no hope of having the skills, the society, the economy, the care, and the well-being we all desire in the future. This is the reality that all those campaigning against migration ignore.
Now, what are we going to do about it, because we have to?
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Not only inward migration; inward investment is also needed on a huge scale. And yet today I read that Starmer is to listen to overseas software companies for his ID card scheme – that will likely cost several tens of billions of pounds, all spent abroad and which the UK Exchequer will not be able to control or recover through taxation and the like.
Bizarre
Not at all bizarre.
Given the number of high-pressure lobbyists working to control what the government is allowed to think or say, it’s entirely predictable.
The only thing that will change this trajectory is the bursting of the “AI” bubble.
It can’t come soon enough.
Clearly mega corporations in the US are finding ways to create new money to “invest” in their datacentres and projects; the amount they’re spending on lobbyists is small change.
Things are likely to get worse in Japan as they have just elected a Thatcher devotee into Government.
It is interesting that the Meloni government in Italy (from the populist right) is now liberalising it’s immigration policy as the worker shortage hits Italy.
Mrs B of Tory Fantasy Land seems to have other ideas. She wants a British ICE and more stop and search. I fail to see how this is different from the Gestapo law of 1936. On a fascism scale this is a 9. She says she is being serious. I believe her.
It is fascism
Heseltine said so too
Agreed, but when you have most of the M.S.M, and a goodly number of politicians, along with their parties, promoting the fallacy that inward migration is the root of most of our troubles, it shows the magnitude of the task.
A seemingly unshakable aim of our political parties is growth!
I ask …
Will the extent of fairy lights on British buildings this year be adequate?
Will our population own a sufficient number of T-shirts?
Is it essential that there will be significantly more cars on our roads? Will the total volume of those cars be impressive?
Can there be no limit to the number of square metres of housing floor space per person?
The identified problem in Japan, and here, is skilled labour.
Second, utility bills are to increase – but higher usage attracts lower unit charges.
The wealthy can never be satisfied which but that is what capitalist advertising aims for. It’s not only advertising. ultra processed food is designed to be addictive. The treatment of obesity – and a range of other maladies – is much more costly than healthy food.
Fourth, it would be wise to conserve raw materials to meet the needs of both current and future populations.
Fifth, control of pollution and waste disposal are worldwide problems.
Then there’s climate change and numerous environmental issues. It is still possible to ameliorate them. Problems better faced than simply denied.
The need for restraint is obvious
Families mostly use the concept of fairness.
Materials, finance and labour need to be better distributed, but with growth as the mantra, wealthy countries cannot all have everything that they think they need.
Rationing was imposed during WW2. As a direct result child health was better in 1945 than it had been in 1939. A ‘Utility’ brand was devised to restrain use of wood for furniture, cloth for garments and other items. I would like to see a ‘utility’ computer that could be used for all the basics and a few other tasks. It could be made available to all secondary school children and the software would not be changed for 5 or 10 years.
Countries like ours are happy to accept migrants with skills in medicine, teaching, building industry proficiencies etc. It would be fairer if, in return, we trained for such professions in some of their countries of origin.
One reason for migration is that remuneration in less developed countries is much lower. How could we compensate their homelands?
To encourage careful use of resources, unit prices water, gas and electricity could be low for basic needs but with escalating prices as more and more is used.
Japan and Korea clearly have a massive problem, with births per 1000 people at 6-7 per year and populations in accelerating decline since 2000. But I am a bit mystified as to why you lump the UK in with them. Our birth rate is above 11 per 1000 people and our population has grown by about 10 million (17%) since 2000. At the same time, our youth unemployment rate (16-24 year olds) has risen to 13.8%. I am sure it is a very complicated question, but these figures do not seem to show that we have a problem of declining numbers. What am I missing?
We are way below replacement rate of 2.1 per women of child bearing age. Currently around 1.4.
Automation will partly address the loss of woodworking skills in Japan. In Europe I have seen factory-fabricated wooden houses erected in 1 day including service connection. In the case of “Those campaigning against migration”, this is just a tactic to gain power – unless they plan to destory the Uk (perhaps they do?) migration will have to continue.
(& a PS: pre-fab wooden houses can have very impressive thermal performance)
Why can’t we make them here Mike?
What I have seen look great
We do.
But it is the third sector doing it, on a very small scale.
I am involved in this, in my neighbourhood. I know these people. It can be scaled up, it could be done elsewhere.
https://wecanmake.org/fieldnotes/new-housing-futures/
Agreed
I’m afraid that this is just yet another example of a tired, intellectually moribund administration unable to apply creative thinking to anything.
Thanks to RobertJ for the link – they have a very good .pdf on wood construction
Colin Hines has talked in the past about a population policy.
Now its going down and not up, surely its just what we need working out how many migrants we need and ensuring we make the best use of our working age population.
Many years ago a former neighbour talked about his family who came from Southern Italy. After WW2 the British Government sent agents to recruit workers, women went to the NHS & men to the Coal Mines.
There are also large numbers of service men and women recruited from the Commonwealth and of course the Ghurkas so why cant we start ‘recruiting’ abroad with the agreement of the nations we are recruiting from for the people we need?
It was fascinating to hear from a man who had been a Policeman in the Caribbean, one day the Navy turned up recruiting and now here he was on HMS Ocean (I think!) and enjoying every minute of it.
In 2009 I worked for a financial services company, for my sins.
We went to Eastern Europe in search of new employees, which you can’t do now because of Brexit.
Not enough tax accountants – that spells certain doom…
We were in Japan last year at my son’s wedding – I now have a Japanese daughter in law, who lives in the UK with him. They do have foreign workers in Japan but it helps to speak/write good Japanese, as my son does and he did an elective spell as a doctor at a hospital there.
You’d never get the impression from Tokyo and other cities that they have a declining population but they now have an incredible 9 million empty houses, about 14% of the housing stock.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/may/01/akyia-houses-why-japan-has-nine-million-empty-homes
A lot of people I know and work with just want to retire, they’ve had enough (me included). To be honest I’d rather be out there getting arrested for supporting Palestine or something, something I really cared about. I did care about social housing but the way it is going, Council’s will run out of money to develop new affordable homes in and around 20-25 years if not sooner.
With wages that can’t keep up, being fleeced for this and that and being ran ragged, I’d quite happily hand over to someone younger to make the most of what is left of the decline of the public sector and give them a chance.
Except that I can’t afford to retire because they screwed around with my pension, used austerity and refused to manage markets and reduce health services.
So the country is paralysed by fear over money – there is not enough for anything apparently so everything sort of stops.
Some questions dangling there for the Japanese: recruiting quality Japanese chefs abroad? And how far can you base your armed forces on foreign recruits? (We welcomed French Foreign Legion kids at our country gate last year who were subsequently sacrificed in Ukraine without being acknowledged as French, so maybe there’s space for some.). And if we’re going to Japanese examples, please include their systems for forming talents in demand. It’s not all about birthrate.
Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson knew what they were doing.
But its not just about numbers.
They need to be deployed.
I’ve Just been reading Torsten Bell “How we get our future Back” which is very long on analysis of the problem . But having taken the reader through all that he reveals that the population already know what has to be done:
improve public services
increase wages and provide a higher standard of living
increase investment
improve polical leadership
provide more affordable , better quality housing.
Unfortunately he is a little light on how that will be achieved.
All hands to the pump is what is required in a crisis.
Racism will not solve anything.
Typical crap neoliberal book then.