The UK must stop importing doctors, IT workers and other skilled professionals. Fix the education system and Britain is more than capable of meeting its own needs in these and other areas – as well as astonishing the world with it's innovation.

Given the resource squeeze in food and energy is importing masses amounts of people who really feel no alliance to Britain – or Europe – a good idea.

I was in India in January at the time of Gordon Brown’s visit the country. I was struck by the televised “UK-India” debate attended by government and business leaders (e.g. Richard Branson, Arun Sarin of Vodafone, Karan Bilimoria of Cobra Beer, etc) and academics. What struck me most was the almost unquestioned assumption by both Britons and Indians of what might be called the Anglo-Saxon orthodoxy of open markets and individual entrepreneurship. Richard Branson made a strong case for the British and Indian governments dismantling precisely the kind of protectionist measures that president Sarkozy of France still seems to believe in 250 years after their debunking by Adam Smith. That no one on the Indian side seemed to question the liberal economic orthodoxy is quite a change in a country once famed for its ‘permit economy’ where more entrepreneurial activity was devoted to obtaining the license from officialdom necessary to be in business than was devoted to actually producing goods or services that people might want to buy. The rise of
India however seems to date from precisely the point in time at which these practices were abandoned and they opened up to the globalising world. Following this televised “UK – India” debate I was left with the strong impression that the UK shares more of a common political and economic culture with far-away India than it does with all those European countries that still bang-on about their ‘social model’.