Lots of knowledge people on here including some NHS so you may be able to assist me debunk a nonsense brexiteer claim my old man made the other day because he 'heard it on the radio'.
Apparently a Tory MP claimed that once we leave the EU we'll be able to employ an influx of indian doctors because currently the EU sets a limit on non-eu hires. As far as I'm aware it's the UK government that sets this limit to the tier 2 visas? Am i wrong?
I haven't posted on here for months as I've been swamped with other things recently and don't really have much time for football non stop, let alone forums. However, I have been browsing the CE forum from time to time to keep abreast of recent developments.
This made me want to log back in though just to answer this.
This is a half truth wrapped in a lie.
The EU does not set a limit on our non-EU hires. The EU does not control how we staff and man our NHS, it is why most countries in the EU have a much higher beds per 100k population than we do for instance.
What is kind of true though is that as EU citizens can come into the UK to work as either doctors or nurses and are at a huge advantage compared to their non EU counterparts, successive (especially Tory) governments balance this influx with their commitment to slash immigration by massively restricting immigration from other countries, even in areas of need such as the NHS.
So it isn't an EU directive. The Tories have responded in a political way to a lack of control viz a viz the European borders by restricting immigration from elsewhere to try to keep overall numbers doen.
So yes, if we leave the EU and decide to block off EU citizens from coming to the UK to work in the NHS, we can open our borders to Indian/Pakistani/Syrian/Egyptian/ Ghanian doctors etc and fill some posts here. This is already happening to an extent.
Putting aside the very morally ambiguous nature of this, it leaves aside that the Tories have led us to a 10K doctor deficit and 43k (I believe) nursing deficit because the NHS is increasingly a shit place to work and many doctors and nurses end up leaving. Home grown doctors leave, foreign doctors come, train for a bit and then also leave. I know quite a few Indian doctors who've decided its better to go back home and work privately. They're training less nurses ever since the government scrapped nursing bursaries. Until large social media campaigns, the hostile atmosphere May and the Tories helped to foster has almost deported multiple doctors for a tiny mistake on their immigration forms, which they were not allowed to correct.
Can't be bothered to read it all: No, the EU does not restrict how many doctors we can import from other countries, it is a purely political decision from Tories so they can pretend they're tough on immigration. And the fact they don't want to fund the NHS properly and therefore probably don't want to find the salaries for an extra 53,000 employees.
