So, the government’s bright idea this week: stop foreign care workers from coming to the UK. Because obviously, the problem with the care sector isn’t chronic underfunding, rock-bottom wages, or burnout—it’s just that too many of those bastard foreigners are doing the work that baby boomers or racist blokes down the pub could be doing.

Fucking genius. Really. Bravo.

Care Work: The New Frontier for Bankers and Barristers?

So, if baby boomers and barstool bullshitters won’t do it who exactly is going to do the work now? Will we be seeing solicitors rolling up their sleeves for the morning shift at the care home? Maybe that nice chap from the bank who helped you remortgage your house last year will pop round to change adult incontinence pads on his lunch break. Perhaps a few City boys will trade in their cufflinks for latex gloves?

Or—maybe, just maybe, I’m wrong. A host of Big Frank’s, who have been holding court at the end of the bar for the past 20 years, banging on about how “this country’s gone soft,” will finally rise from their sticky barstools and answer the call of duty. Let’s hope they have worked out how to lift someone safely without shouting “just stand up, Doris for facks sake!” at a 90-year-old with osteoporosis.

Why Do Foreigners Take These Jobs? (Clue: Nobody Else Will)

Let’s spell it out slowly, shall we: people from abroad come here to be care workers because there aren’t enough people here willing—or able—to do it. The pay’s low, the hours are long, the emotional toll is massive, and the working conditions are, shall we say, “challenging.” And yet, instead of fixing any of that, the government’s solution is to pull the plug on the only real workforce keeping the sector from complete collapse.

This isn’t reform. It’s sabotage. What world do these people live in? Not the one most of us do, apparently.

Policy Written on a Fag Packet

But let’s not pretend this is about real solutions. This has all the hallmarks of a late-night brainstorm between someone who once saw a care home on Panorama and a minister desperately trying to pacify the frothing-at-the-mouth right-wingers in the nuthouse end of the Tory Party and Nigel Farage’s latest populist grifting machine.

It’s a back-of-the-fag-packet policy, designed to get a few claps from the “send ‘em all back” brigade and zero interest in whether Grandma gets her medication on time next week. Because this isn’t about care, or even immigration—it’s about political optics. Grim, short-sighted, and utterly divorced from the reality facing the care sector. It’s madness. If I can see that, why can’t Labour politicians?

We Needed Help. We Got a Soundbite.

Let’s Recap:

We need care workers.

We don’t have enough care workers.

People from abroad have been filling that gap.

The government has decided to ban the very people who are willing to help.

How on earth is this going to work? Are we meant to rely on a miraculous surge of patriotic career changers to suddenly take up care work out of sheer blitz spirit as nutters in parliament declare air lifts of half dead pensioners from empty care homes as our 21st Century Dunkirk. I’ll tell you something and come back to me later if I am not right. It won’t happen.

We are fucked without foreign care workers, so don’t get old.