after all this the UK is seriously proposing free movement of people (among a pile of other things) again?!
The working visas that are created for this will remove the rights UK citizens have to make the visa holders "more attractive" to employers.
Good luck to native workers in the UK competing with an Indian on a work visa that has no working time regulations, holiday allowance, etc. and very little leverage to complain in case their visa gets revoked.
There's an important point to highlight here: low paid workers from India working long hours with no holiday will not actually be able to compete with either highly skilled Indian workers who can already get visas, or highly skilled native workers or workers from other developed countries, even if they demand holiday, high pay, etc.
Indeed, this migration report [1] suggests that immigration decreases wages for low paid workers, but increases wages for medium and high paid workers.
Immigration doesn't just boost labour supply, it boosts demand too, but not always in the same jobs, so the effects on wages can be uneven.
If it were that simple to replace highly paid workers, we'd have all already been offshored, but that never seems to materialise.
1: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/th...
The Conservatives should've stuck with May's compromise - now Labour are likely to take power.
It was blocked by Labour and other parties.
It would have been the most practical way forward at the time. It would have been softer and better planned and with a better working relationship with the EU.
It would also have meant that Labour would have been in partial control of parliament for another 3 years as May's majority relied on people who hated her and was never going to last for every vote. Then we would have had another election this year not in 2019.
I honestly don't know what people were thinking at the time. It was obvious that not compromising would end in chaos.