There be a rumbling and a sound of clucking chickens in the air

Or should that be Turkeys? It’s not looking good for citizens of nowhere these days. Although I don’t have their wanderlust, as a rentier I’m now probably part of the managerial aristocracy that’s been doing okay out of the TINA world order up to now. Said world order pretty much destroyed my job by first deskilling it and then exporting it to India, but I was lucky enough to be old enough to escape the rat race by sneaking under the falling portcullis.

I was never convinced by the theory of the lump of labour fallacy, and figured unrestricted low-wage immigration was going to lower wages for the poorer end of First World workers, a fair number of these voted for Brexit. Lo and behold, we seem to be getting evidence of the inverse effect of lower wages from the CIPD once the firehose of low-skilled workers is throttled back a smidgen – to wit

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) said the number of applicants per vacancy had fallen since last summer across all levels of skilled jobs, and said shortages were forcing many companies to raise wages.

[…]

The number of people applying for the average low-skilled vacancy has fallen from 24 to 20 in the past year and from 19 to 10 for medium-skilled posts.

Well I’ll be flippin’ damned. Who’d a thunk it, eh? At least some Brexit voters may get some of what they wanted. The fall in low-end applicants is 20% compared to the 10% fall in higher-end applicants, highlighting who has been taking the sharp end of that shaft. It’s an ill wind…

Perhaps if our welfare and unemployment system hadn’t turned quite so vile and nasty in peddling the chimera that work is the way out of poverty for the unskilled and make them feel so shit about themselves, then we could have come to a better way of divvying up of the spoils of war. And of course these guys will have to spend some of their slightly increased wages on paying a lot more for imported goods and services on WTO terms if they are lucky, our man Jacob Rees-Mogg and the vile shit-stirrer Boris Johnson will see to that. Let’s look on the bright side, though. At least BoJo is no longer in the Foreign Office. British diplomacy used to be envied, while often suspected of perfidy. We will probably need friends in future, the great BJ never was an asset in that line of work.