Diane Abbott MP, Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary, responding to the Government’s Immigration White Paper, said:

“The Government has disgracefully labelled workers on less than £30,000 as low-skilled. Our economy and public services are kept ticking by this majority of workers.

“The Government is not, as it wrongly claims, using skills-based criteria to meet the needs of our economy and our society. It is using an income-based system which allows derivatives traders free movement but which excludes nurses, social care workers and other professions in which we have severe skills or labour shortages.

“The Tories are, once again, using crude anti-migrant rhetoric to try to cover up for their abject failure of managing the economy and the Brexit negotiations.”