By Elizabeth Piper and Kylie MacLellan
MANCHESTER, England (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Sunday that he would not return to “uncontrolled immigration” to resolve the fuel, gas and food crises at Christmas, suggesting that such tensions were part of a period of post-adjustment -Brexit.
At the start of his Conservative Party conference, Johnson was again forced to defend his government against complaints from those who cannot get gas for their cars, from retailers warning of the Christmas shortage and from companies in gas struggling against a rise in wholesale prices.
The British leader hoped to use the conference to turn the page on more than 18 months of COVID-19 and refocus on his 2019 election promises to address regional inequality, crime and social care.
Instead, the prime minister is on the tightrope nine months after Britain completed its exit from the European Union, a departure that he said would give the country the freedom to better shape its economy.
“The way forward for our country is not simply to pull the great lever marked by uncontrolled immigration, and allow the entry of a large number of people to work … So what I am not going to do is go back to the old model. low-wage, low-skill failure supported by uncontrolled immigration, “he said on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.
“When people voted for change in 2016 and (…) again in 2019 as they did, they voted for the end of a broken model of the UK economy that was based on low wages and low skill and chronic low productivity, and we are moving away from that, “he explained.
It was the closest the prime minister has come to admitting that the UK’s exit from the EU had contributed to tensions in supply chains and workforce, spreading to everything from fuel deliveries to potential shortages. turkeys for Christmas.
“There will be a period of adjustment, but I think that is what we have to see,” he said.
He made it clear that he would not turn on the immigration taps to fill those gaps, once again shifting the responsibility to companies to raise wages and attract more workers.
Post-Brexit worker shortages and the COVID-19 pandemic have caused confusion in some sectors of the economy, disrupting deliveries of fuel and medicine.
Conservative Party Chairman Oliver Dowden said the government was taking steps to hire more truckers overall and that the government had started training tanker personnel to begin delivering fuel on Monday.
(Additional information from Paul Sandle, edited by Christina Fincher and Hugh Lawson, edited in Spanish by Gabriela Donoso)