How Labour's immigration obsession is hurting Scotland's sheep farmers despite climbdown
Labour is determined to stop issuing visas for overseas sheep shearers despite the problems for farmers and the animal welfare crisis that this will cause
Don’t call it a ewe-turn. Last week, after much prodding, ministers backed down and agreed to grant temporary-worker visas for sheep shearers, averting a potential animal welfare crisis for one-and-a-half-million sheep this summer.
It seems, however, that Labour’s neuroses over immigration are going to keep hurting farmers – and our wider economy – for some time yet. The government has now said that they are intent on blocking those seasonal shearer visas for good, starting from next year.
Whether or not you know your Scottish Blackfaces from your Borerays, we should all be concerned about the government’s ignorance and seeming indifference to the most basic issues that matter to farmers and crofters.
The signs were not good when it emerged under questioning in parliament that senior Defra civil servants were unaware of the looming animal welfare crisis from a lack of sheep shearers in the first place. “We might be doing a very active programme of work... I don’t know” are not quite the words that you hope to hear from the head of an entire department.
More concerning is the growing impression that these basic-but-essential policy questions are out of Defra’s hands and in the clutches of the Home Office, a department that appears to have contempt for all other areas of government – particularly those that contribute something to our economy.
After all, the visas needed for sheep shearers are enormously important but miniscule in numbers – just 75 or thereabouts. The only way you could see this as a problem is if you have the Home Office’s bloody-minded focus on cutting every visa in sight and have no understanding of proportionality or of the communities you seek to regulate.
There are important social aspects of this issue that Labour, whether in Defra or the Home Office, clearly do not grasp.
As the average age of farmers continues to rise, we have more older farmers who rely on being able to contract out work like this to younger people. Those 75 foreign shearers that the Home Office wants to keep out could shear up to 1.5 million sheep in the short time they are here – and once they are finished, they move on to the next country. They pose a near-zero risk of over-staying their visas.
Meanwhile, far from encouraging more jobs locally as Labour seems to believe, this policy would directly harm our own young farmers. The squad of shearers who travel the world include a number of British young farmers. For them this is a great opportunity to see a bit of the world and see how things are done by farmers elsewhere. These reciprocal arrangements for shearers work well for everyone.
It raises the question of whether Labour learned anything from the inheritance tax debacle of the last year – a political misstep built on a fundamental misunderstanding of how farming communities work. If the goal this year was to reset that relationship, then they have fallen at the first hurdle.
The government claims to want a more constructive relationship with farmers and crofters going forward. The only way that is going to happen is if they stop telling us what we need – and start listening instead.
Alistair Carmichael is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland
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