Michael Gove: Bring in migrant points system after Brexit

Michael Gove wants an Australian-style points system for migrants
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An Australian-style points system should be brought in to curb immigration from the European Union after a British exit, Michael Gove said today.

The Justice Secretary said would-be migrants from poorer countries in eastern Europe would have to show they had the skills and talents that Britain needs before being allowed in.

At the same time he announced the UK would be freed to attract “top doctors and scientists” from countries such as India to boost the NHS and industry. “Instead of a European open-door migration policy we could — if a future Government wanted it — have an Australian points-based migration policy,” he said.

“We could emulate that country’s admirable record of taking in genuine refugees, giving a welcome to hard-working new citizens and building a successful multi-racial society without giving in to people-smugglers, illegal migration or subversion of borders.”

It put immigration at the heart of Leave campaign arguments for an independence vote on June 23. It comes a day after George Osborne published a “bombshell” Treasury analysis that tacitly conceded migration from the EU would continue to run over 100,000 each year if the UK remains in the EU.

Mr Gove said five more countries — Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey — were “in the queue to join the EU” and citizens of them all would have complete freedom to work in the UK if they were successful.

He took up the campaign waged by London MEP Syed Kamall to allow more migrants from non-EU countries with close links to Britain. He also attacked Remain warnings that Britain would be ganged-up on by the EU if it left or that the EU would fall apart, saying: “An EU without the UK cannot simultaneously be a super-charged leviathan bent on revenge and a crumbling Tower of Babel riven by conflict.”

Mr Gove agreed there would be “contagion” if Britain quit, but argued that would be good for the EU.

Former attorney general Dominic Grieve accused Mr Gove of “a sort of single-issue obsession, so he is no longer seeing the wood for the trees”.

Labour MP Chuka Umunna, a Remain campaigner, accused Leave campaigners of talking “garbage”. He told Good Morning Britain: “Those who want us to leave can’t answer the question: ‘Will we be able to have all the benefits we have in the EU, being part of that big, free trade, single market trading zone if we come out, can you guarantee that?’ They don’t have an answer to that.”

He mocked the idea of a “big conspiracy theory” that union leaders were “in cahoots with those well-known socialists at the Confederation of British Industry” against Brexit.

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