Daily US Times: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has pledged the Conservatives will “change and improve” the economy after the coronavirus pandemic, as the party opens its annual conference later.
British economy, like many others across the world, has suffered due to the pandemic.
Mr Johnson said the country can’t “go back to how things were” before the pandemic.
The promise comes after the Prime Minister accused the haulage industry of being too reliant on low-paid immigration, amid shortages at petrol stations.
The British soldiers are due to begin delivering petrol across the country from Monday.
Two hundred British military service personnel, 100 of them drivers, will provide “temporary” support to ease pressure on forecourts.
The government will also give 5,000 temporary visas for foreign lorry drivers to plug a shortage of lorry drivers worsened by the pandemic, Brexit and other factors.
Although opposition parties and the leaders of fuel industry have dismissed these figures as inadequate, Mr Johnson has said importing drivers is not a long-term solution.
He said on Saturday: “What we don’t want to do is go back to a situation in which we basically allowed the road haulage industry to be sustained with a lot of low-wage immigration.”
Mr Johnson added that a “mass immigration approach” had made the energy sector less attractive by reducing wages and “the quality of the job”.
“People don’t want that. They want us to be a well-paid, well-skilled, highly productive economy and that’s where we’re going.”
However, Mr Johnson didn’t rule out issuing more temporary visas to make the situation normal, saying the situation would remain “under review”.
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