Who killed the great British curry house? (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Who killed the great British curry house? (2017)

theguardian.com

> In fact, Khan was one of many curry house owners who backed Brexit in 2016, in the hope that exiting the EU would bring more favourable terms for south Asian immigrants. The president of the BCA, Pasha Khandaker, explicitly urged the association’s 4,000 members to vote leave, while the then employment minister, Priti Patel, told British Asian voters that by voting leave, they could “save our curry houses and join the rest of the world”.

This part is hilarious and telling. I will never understand how politicians so easily get people to vote against their own interests.

Was it wrong? As I understand, South Asian immigration to the UK has increased since Brexit.

Yes it was wrong, and the article being discussed points out exactly why.

See quote from article:

> ... Since the Brexit vote and the subsequent collapse of the pound, independent food outlets of all kinds have been hurt by rises in rents, rates and food prices. Meanwhile, in families that run curry houses younger generations have moved away from catering to more lucrative jobs in medicine or tech. So long as there was a ready supply of new onion choppers from Asia, the exodus of upwardly mobile offspring did not affect curry houses too much. The real blow came when a harsh new politics of immigration came in, which made it harder for skilled south Asian chefs to work in the country, just as the wider British public were changing the ways in which they consumed curry...

> ... It is now dawning that under Theresa May’s government, the prospect of more Bangladeshi chefs being granted work visas is more distant than ever. A law that came into effect in April 2016 states that a skilled chef from south Asia must earn £35,000 or more a year, after deductions for accommodation and meals, to come work in a British restaurant that also offers a takeaway service. (The figure is only slightly lower for restaurants without takeaways.) Lord Bilimoria, the entrepreneur behind Cobra beer, is part of an all-party parliamentary group lobbying to reverse the law, which he calls “ridiculous” and “discriminatory”. No ordinary curry chef earns £35,000 (the industry average is £22-25,000 but the cooks who marinate lamb chops and mix raita get less)...

In short, while axing immigration from the EU we also made it impossible for any working class migrant outside the EU to cross our borders. I'm sure all these worker shortages in agriculture/industry/hospitality/services/healthcare/construction are doing wonders for our nations' economic growth...

This article is six years old, published only a year after the Brexit vote. Since then non-EU migration has risen dramatically; now outnumbering immigration from inside the EU by a ratio of about 8:1. Student visas provide an entryway to hundreds of thousands without the need to satisfy income requirements. I suspect that if there is a challenge facing curryhouses it is not immigration. Maybe a more atomised society which prefers deliveroo to eating out on the cheap and regular is more to blame.

Non-EU migration has gone up, but that's a very broad stroke to apply. In my experience there has been a marked increase in the number of South Asian tech workers. Potentially the UK is in fact skimming skilled labour from countries that could really use some domestic development.

It's worth noting that:

* A great majority of the increase in work visas comes from African rather than South Asian countries

* Long-term work visas are generally given for ICT or "skilled" work

* "Skilled" work has a salary floor of around £26k

* A curry chef's salary averages around £25k

Sources:

* https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-...

* https://www.gov.uk/skilled-worker-visa

* https://www.checkasalary.co.uk/salary/curry-chef-england

* https://www.statista.com/statistics/1241587/indian-populatio...

And either way the lede is being buried here.

The Brexit leaders were just going around lying and telling everyone what they wanted to hear.

The broader public was being told immigration would be reduced (now that’s not happening, they’re trying to shift the focus to “small boats” but polls are showing that’s clearly not working). Curry shop owners were told it would increase immigration to the people they wanted. But the only reason we know this because it’s an in depth article about curry shops. So we found this out coincidentally.

It’s likely that there’s a whole bunch of other industries that were also told XYZ type of immigration would be increased even if overall immigration was decreased.

As it turns out, the majority of those claims will turn out to be lies, and the ones that are true are coincidentally true.

This is the fundamental scam underlying Brexit. There was no plan and as a result everyone was being told whatever they wanted would be delivered through Brexit.

Typically a comment like yours would include a couple of external references that back up the claims you're making. Without them that's just like your opinion, man.

The immigration numbers to Britain and their student/non-student ratios are widely stats at this point and not someone's opinion, this stuff isn't secret.

Current proposals severely limit the amount of time students can stay in the country post-graduation, however, which will prevent student visas from serving as an entryway.

The student visa as a path to entry is a bug, not a feature, to the Tories.

It would be helpful here to have an explanation of how this story fits with the actual increase of immigration since Brexit.

Why do you act like it's a given that it's in a British citizen's interest to increase immigration? This goes for British citizens of South Asian descent. What have they got to gain?

I'm always surprised to see people with this "we need endless immigration or you won't have diverse restaurants" mentality. And it's always coming from the most privileged people in society, and always condescendingly talking down to people who don't vote like they do. (i.e. people like Guardian writers and you)

"Vote against their own interests" almost always means "vote contrary to my preferences, the imbeciles".

Nonsense. It means people voting for policies that they think will be positive for their lives but actually are negative for them. Which is a very common occurrence, regardless of your apparently disliking people pointing it out.

Maybe, but not in this case. In this case the person in question was promised something ("more favourable terms for south Asian immigrants"). He voted accordingly. His side of the vote won. And he got the exact opposite as a result.

Rtfa. Restaurant owners voted for brexit in the hopes that it would help them import more cheap labor. Surprise – the exact opposite happened.

Immigration to Britain has been at record highs since brexit, particularly non EU immigration. It seems they were exactly right on the money.

Except it’s not the people they were expecting. It’s largely students and fruit pickers.

The former because the UK needs the money (and the US has become increasingly hostile) and the latter because they need the labour.

So yeah, it worked for some definition of worked where the thing happened, but not at all in the way or with the outcome they wanted it to happen.

> Since the Brexit vote and the subsequent collapse of the pound

Is there any kind of agreed definition of "collapse"? Currencies rise, currencies fall. The GBPEUR rate today (1.15) appears to be almost exactly the same as it was in early July 2013, almost ten whole years ago.

The GBP USD rate went from 1.6245 on Jan 1 2013 to 1.25 today - which is a drop. Perhaps this is what is being focused on.

But your comment is dead on - this doesn’t feel like a collapse it feels like currency fluctuations, at least from the outside.

Some amount of that is also due to the strength of the USD. The Euro was trading higher then as well.

That came after the brexit vote. We are talking about the crash in the value after the Brexit vote.

The ancestor comments was giving the GBP/USD rate in 2013. At that time the Euro was worth about 1.30. Now it is about 1.05 My claim is therefore that the "collapse" in the value of the pound is actually instead a rise in the value of the dollar.

I think the better question is, why are we talking about a short term fluctuation that happened years ago and has since corrected itself?

Looking immediately before the referendum vote and afterwards, the pound fell from 1.3039 to 1.1639 over two weeks - a loss of ten percent which can pretty much directly be attributed to the vote.

When this article was written in January 2017, the pound was at about 1.15, which would have been down from 1.35 a year before - a loss of around 15 percent.

Looking over a broader time-range, before the financial crisis in 2008, the pound was roughly stable at around 1.45 EUR. This fell during the recession years, but was reaching 1.40 levels again in 2015. Since the referendum it has consistently been between roughly 1.20 and 1.10.

So, in summary - there was a fall (not sure I'd necessarily say a collapse) in the value of the pound as a direct response to the Brexit referendum. However the pound had been low (c. 1.15) in value since 2007, apart from a bump in mid-2014 to mid-2016

> Looking immediately before the referendum vote and afterwards

Umm, Cameron announced that he would propose to hold a referendum on EU membership if his party won the next general election way back in January 2013 [0]

The GBPEUR midrate at the end of that month was 1.167 [1]

Doesn't look quite as much of a story if one were to write about the British pound "plunging" from 1.167 when the possibility of a Brexit was first mentioned to, umm, 1.15 the day after the vote, does it?

BTW, I fully appreciate that the immediate movement due to the outcome of the vote was large, but there were a lot of expectations baked in, Cameron also promptly resigned after "losing" the vote, and political shocks like those aren't necessarily what you look for if you're hoping for a strong currency!

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jan/23/david-camer... [1] https://www.xe.com/currencytables/?from=GBP&date=2013-01-31

Not exactly a collapse, and a fall was always going to be the case; Brussels was always going to absolutely murder the first country to leave, as an example to the other states.

Are you missing a figure my friend?

The lowest rate I see in July 2013 is 1.48 (NOT 1.148). Todays rate is 1.24. Down 17%?

The usual rate was somewhere around 1.6 pre-Brexit, down ~25%. I think that's a bigger shift than ever seen outside of (other) catastrophes...

https://www.dailyfx.com/gbp-usd

> Are you missing a figure my friend?

We're talking about two different currency pairs, I quoted GBP EUR rates, you're referencing GBP USD rates... ?

I couldn't understand why an article (that I posted) about the decline in popularity of British curry houses would be flagged until I read the comments and realised what an idiot I was to not see the opportunity for a political flamewar over a bit of takeaway.

Good job HN. Next time, let's make toilet paper orientation an issue of identity politics.

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