Chris

A good analysis, up to a point. Sadly however the author clearly comes from the left-leaning school that thinks chanting Tory! Tory! Tory! is a handy way of summoning a bogeyman, a suitably ill-defined thing that is generally agreed to be not very nice and therefore a suitable target to blame for whatever.

However, there are two obvious weaknesses, the first being that the infrastructure required to deliver state services has long lead-times and really ought to have been in the planning years before it was needed, or at the very least right from when the need became apparent. And that wasn’t at the point of the financial crash, it was when free movement was first extended to Eastern Europe and the *Labour* government then in charge took an active decision not to invoke any of the temporary limitations allowable under EU law.

The second obvious weakness is to blame failure in domestic government policy while taking it as given that uncontrolled migration across a bloc with wildly different living standards is itself an unimpeachably good thing. The author hasn’t made that case and shouldn’t assume it to be so.