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THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT will force companies to list all their foreign workers in a bid to shame firms that turn down UK citizens.
The proposals, revealed by the new UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd at the Conservative Party conference yesterday, are intended to pressure companies to take on more local workers and to “prevent migrants taking jobs [that] British people can do”.
It is believed that, as the proposals refer to non-British workers only, that the list will include EU citizens, including those from the Republic of Ireland.
The UK Home Office was unable to confirm this following a query from TheJournal.ie this morning, but said further clarification will be forthcoming later today.
Rudd, who lived in New York for several years, also promised to target students from outside the EU with tougher visa rules, in a speech to applause from Conservative Party members. She has denied the proposal is xenophobic.
Taking jobs
The London Times reports that it would initially apply to non-EU workers, but be extended to all non-UK staff upon the completion of Brexit.
Business would be expected to publish the figures for each site where the workers were based. “The test should ensure people coming here are filling gaps in the labour market, not taking jobs British people could do,” Rudd said yesterday.
After keeping a decidedly low profile since his re-election as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn finally released a statement this lunchtime condemning the Government’s plans.
He said:
Conservative Party leaders have sunk to a new low this week as they fan the flames of xenophobia and hatred in our communities and try to blame foreigners for their own failures.
Today, Rudd was unrepentant.
“We should be able to have a conversation about immigration, we should be able to have a conversation about what skills we want to have in the UK and whether we need to go out of the UK in order to get them to boost our economy and I don’t think we should have a situation where we can’t talk about it,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
The scheme was one of several under consideration and “not something we’re definitely going to do”, Rudd admitted this morning.
Her comments have sparked a backlash among business leaders, who point out that migrants benefit the economy, amid record levels of employment in the UK.
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Alistair Carmichael said the plans could have come from the hard right of the Tories, who are attempting to heal it divisions over the Brexit referendum.
“The ‘nasty party’ hasn’t come back, rather it seems it never went away,” he told the London Independent. ”This speech is exhibit A on how the Liberal Democrats restrained the Tories. Without us they are showing their true colours – reckless, divisive and uncaring.”
Lord Bilimoria, the chancellor of Birmingham University told BBC Radio 4 that Rudd’s plans were “absolutely shocking”.
Rudd also said that the Government would look at “tougher rules for students on low quality courses”. From December meanwhile, landlords who knowingly rent to illegal immigrants could go to prison. Taxi drivers will also face a clampdown, while bank accounts also face checks.
Jess Phillips MP, a close friend of Jo Cox, the MP who was shot dead in her constituency, is one of several MPs who have criticised the proposals.
Her husband blamed her killing on the divisive and ‘coarsening’ tone of the Brexit debate. A man accused of her murder refused to enter pleas when he appeared at the Old Bailey in London yesterday.
Referring to Rudd’s speech, Phillips said “division killed my friend”, in reference to the late Labour MP.
Jess Phillips MP / Twitter
Jess Phillips MP / Twitter / Twitter
Special badges
Defence Minister Liam Fox also told the conference that EU citizens living in the UK consisted of the Government’s “main card” in Brexit negotiations.
A Scottish National Party MP, has compared the plan for a list of foreign workers to the policies pursued by the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1930s.
“What next?” asked Paul Monaghan. “Make them wear them special badges and stop them owning anything?”
The Green Party has said the “falsehood” that migrants are to blame for the UK’s problems “must be confronted head-on”.
Dr Paul Monaghan MP / Twitter"Firms must list foreign workers"! What next? Make them wear special badges and stop them owning anything? pic.twitter.com/hyBJjZwKsZ
— Dr Paul Monaghan (@_PaulMonaghan) October 4, 2016
Foreign doctors
The new proposals follow the announcement that England will train more doctors so that it can end its reliance on foreign recruits for the state-funded National Health Service after it leaves the European Union.
“Currently a quarter of our doctors come from overseas,” Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt told the ruling Conservative Party’s conference in Birmingham.
“They do a fantastic job and the NHS would fall over without them. When it comes to those that are EU nationals, we’ve been clear we want them to be able to stay post-Brexit,” he said.
But looking forward, is it right to carry on importing doctors from poorer countries that need them, whilst we turn away bright home graduates desperate to study medicine?
From September 2018, England will train up to 1,500 more doctors every year, increasing the number of medical school places by up to a quarter, he said. There is currently a cap of 6,000 on the number of medical students.
“By the end of the next parliament we will make the NHS self-sufficient in doctors,” Hunt added. Hunt said training a doctor costs more than £200,000 (€230,000). Doctors would be asked to work for the NHS for four years in return.
Net migration
Rudd also told the conference that the Government is committed to getting annual net migration below 100,000. It stood at 327,000 in the year ending March 2016, of which 190,000 were from outside the EU.
Her consultation includes looking at whether student immigration rules should be tailored to the quality of the course and the university.
It will also consider whether to tighten the rules on recruitment and job advertising to make sure immigrants are not coming to jobs that could be done by British workers.
Brexit minister David Davis meanwhile said a work permit system might apply for “low-skilled” migrants.
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Best description I have read when trying to explain cloud, particularly to non techie senior managers is a very simple one liner.
‘Storing your information on someone else’s computer’
Cloud is a window for the NSA.
Frank, does that mean they have access to all data ?
Noone knows for sure but we have good reason to suspect they do.
Sometimes Frank, among all the crazy talk, you do hit the nail on the head.
Security experts also suspect they have a backdoor to break AES encryption.
More than likely they have a back door to your PC and Smart phone irrespective and without a warrant also any email / internet transaction through a US based server can be spied on by the NSA.. Here’s the timeline for domestic Spying…
It is prudent to assume that EVERYTHING is compromised.
I said AES in my last comment. I meant DES.
check out arxshare, this will be difficult for the NSA ;)
What about Mega.co.nz? You get 50gb free & it uses end to end encryption.
Mega is hardly reliable though is it?
Could go down tomorrow for all we know
Data Protection hate the cloud. You have no guarantee as to where your data is stored and no idea of who has physical access. If you hold any sort of confidential data, do NOT use a public cloud. If it’s only your own photos, music and documents, then go for it.
NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a far cheaper per gb ,and safer alternative.
Basically a hard drive connected to your router so it can be accessed online from anywhere. Should be the next big thing in the consumer tech market
It’s cheaper per gb at first glance only.
When you consider quality and reliability of that access – then it’s not that instant winner anymore.
And security wise – many would argue here. If setup wrongly, nas drive may be childishly easy to break into, while professional cloud services mentioned in the article, while still exposed to some breach have the basics definitely better covered – allow less user error.
Of course if you buy crap you get crap but for relatively low investment you can get great quality.
Reliability again is down to your in segment in broadband – invest well get reliability.
Security-wise I’d rather have my data sitting in a hard drive beside my router rather than in a data centre I have no control of – not who handles my drive.
NAS drive:
- uses your household electricity (I know small, but…), cloud not
- is dependable on your Internet connection, cloud is hosted on mesh of super fast links and basically always ON
- is not great for sharing, cloud is (imagine 10 co-workers downloading large graphics files from your NAS)
- is not providing any data redundancy (if your NAS fails your data is gone – unless you have another solution setup for it), cloud is fully redundant
- cannot easily scale, cloud scale very easily if your demands grow
Security? There is no such thing as privacy in the Internet, connecting own NAS disk does not change anything here. You are still using online banking, Facebook, you are still sending emails with attached CV’s or payslips that are stored on email servers, you are still buying in the Internet… Everywhere you touch you leave trace. Therefore cloud is as secure as anything else to me :)
If your house floods or goes on fire your “cloud” storage hasn’t worked at all. Off site backup is key and NAS at home is a crap option unless your get some enjoyment from making things harder then they need to be.
Protip: for people who need large amounts of storage or are concerned about it being spied on, go onto dabs.ie.
Look up western digital my cloud.
1tb own personal cloud you can access anywhere, if I remember right it’s the bones of 100 quid.
Easy set up and no worries.
Also, it’s a physical thing you connect to your own network at home via Ethernet cable, it’s not an online service.
If you’ve got a VPN as well, about as secure as possible.
It’s not a cloud. Its a server.
I’m aware it’s a NAS server but let’s try to keep it simple here.
1. Worry – what if you are burgled and they take the NAS?
Jamie, what kind of authentication and encryption are you using for that?
“Copy” is another cloud based storage app. 35GB’s of space.
Dropbox is the best by far.
I didn’t see any mention of the fact that providers use bots to read your data in order to direct advertising at you. I wouldn’t put anything in the cloud without first applying 128 bit AES encryption.
Dropbox is the best, and very easy to use with a nice interface
Just set your libraries to sync to OneDrive and forget it. It’s solid in all areas and the Office online apps are useful in a pinch.
Simplicity is key.
Logmein’s “Cubby” is brilliant if you need access to clients files. You can create a directory for each client and lock it down with a unique password. It can be setup so each client can only see they’re directory. You get 5gb free, plus it has an app for iOS & Android. I’m paying €45 a year for 1tb of data. Also, If you accidentally delete files, you can recover them anytime and from anywhere. I tried a few cloud systems and most had problems with security and access.
Flickr has an allowance of 1000 gb free.
“That said, each service offers encryption to make sure your data is safe but on the users’ end, the best thing to do is to create a strong password”
I very much disagree with this. Security and privacy must be the main argument for choosing a cloud storage solution, and although they all offer encryption, all mentioned services encrypt on the server, and therefore are not secure and see transport the user’s data in plain text.
There is a trend towards client-side encryption (or end-to-end encryption) and self-hosted clouds. Companies that want to secure their intellectual property should consider solutions like Owncloud or Arxshare http://www.arxshare.com.
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