UK minister wants unemployed Brit youths to be sent to India

LONDON - British Cabinet Minister Vince Cable has stirred controversy by suggesting that unemployed young Britons should be sent to India to find work, and jokingly added, that he might get a “slap over the wrists” from Prime Minister David Cameron for saying so.

He also said it was time to end the one-way flow of skilled workers from India to the UK and claimed that British school-leavers and university graduates should be able to go in the opposite direction to India, where the economy has boomed in recent years.

“I will probably get a slap over the wrists from the headmaster in the morning, but I believe there should be a freer flow of labour,” the Daily Mail quoted Cable, as saying.

He claimed that skilled young employees in India earn about two pounds an hour, less than half of Britain’s minimum wage of 5.93 pounds per hour, though the cost of living is much cheaper. Both countries are now equal partners and there is no reason why the exchange of skilled workers should not be two-way, especially bearing in mind the depressed state of the British jobs market, he added.

The David Cameron government had planned to cut annual immigration to ‘tens of thousands’, rather than the hundreds of thousands. Cable had clashed with Cameron on this issue earlier as well.

One prominent Indian guest at the dinner ten days ago, which was chaired by president of the Indian Journalists Association, Ashis Ray, described Cable’s proposal as ‘unprecedented’.

Cable said that, during a recent visit to India, IT tycoon Azim Premji told him that since Britain has high youth unemployment, they should send people to India to be trained in cutting edge technology companies so they could go back better qualified for work back home.

Praising this idea, Cable said it should be implemented as early as possible. (ANI)