Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform UK and Nigel Farage’s favourite understudy, has said the quiet part out loud: he wants Britain to have a labour shortage. Not to fix the economy, not to raise wages, but to punish the poor and force a new round of productivity through desperation. It’s the politics of the boot. The idea that if you just squeeze people hard enough, something efficient and profitable will pop out the other end. It’s not good economics. It’s sadism.
Tice is arguing against an EU-UK youth mobility scheme that would allow reciprocal work rights for young people. British and European alike. His justification? That Britain needs fewer workers, not more. A tight labour market, he claims, will scare bosses into investing and scare workers into compliance. Fewer workers will mean better work. Less freedom will mean more productivity. It’s the same Thatcherite logic that brought us mass unemployment and zero-hour contracts, dressed up now in Brexit bunting.
Let’s be clear: labour shortages do not create productivity booms. Investment does. Planning does. Coordination does. All the things the likes of Tice and Farage have spent their careers dismantling. British productivity has flatlined not because there are too many young Europeans pulling pints, but because our economy is now built around rent-seeking, asset bubbles, and managerial bloat. Try finding a train that runs on time, a functioning GP surgery, or a company that pays to train its staff. We don’t have too many workers. We have too few decent jobs, and too many people hoarding capital.
Meanwhile, the sectors most reliant on labour, care, the NHS, logistics, food, are already stretched to breaking point. Shortages don’t mean bosses suddenly become generous. They mean hospitals without staff, crops left to rot, care homes where residents are neglected. This isn’t a plan. It’s a managed collapse sold as tough love. And it’s not helped by a Labour government desperately trying to look and act tougher on migration than Reform, mimicking the language of border control and deterrence while abandoning any pretence of solidarity with the workers who keep the country running.
But there’s something darker underneath Tice’s vision. He talks about labour shortages as a cleansing fire, something that will purge the country of “welfare dependency”. It’s the old lie that there’s plenty of work if people just get off their arses. That poverty is personal failure. That the problem with Britain isn’t a system rigged for landlords and hedge funds, but the laziness of the working class. It’s the politics of resentment, aimed downwards, never up.
And when Tice sneers at youth mobility, what he’s really attacking is freedom. The right to live, work, and build a life beyond the narrow borders of a post-Brexit Britain. It’s not migration he hates, it’s solidarity. The idea that young people from Bradford or Bologna might share something in common beyond his little flag-waving bunker.
Britain does not need a labour shortage. It needs a strong labour movement. One that fights for higher wages through organisation, not attrition. One that demands investment, not immiseration. One that sees solidarity as an answer to crisis, not scapegoating.
Tice and his ilk want you to believe that scarcity is strength, that restriction is freedom, that cutting off your nose will somehow make you breathe better. It’s the politics of decline, spoken in the clipped vowels of Little England. Don’t fall for it.
We don’t need fewer workers. We need fewer Tories in disguise.
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