Foreign poets deserve their ‘skilled worker’ visas, Lee

So get this: poets are on the Home Office’s list of skilled workers, making them eligible for a UK work visa.

- LUKE WRIGHT

How do you feel about that? Are you scoffing at the very idea?

Reform’s Lee Anderson is most certainly scoffing. It’s scoff central over at Red Wall HQ. He’s almost as apoplectic about the poets as he is about the inclusion and diversity managers who have also made the list. Not that 30p Lee is anti-literature, no, far from it, it’s just that we don’t need no foreign poets. No, not here in “the land of literary giants like Shakespeare and PG Wodehouse”, he declares, adding that as “a nation with the richest literary tradition in the world, the UK does not need to import poets”.

I doubt Lee Anderson could actually name any of my contemporary poets, but I did enjoy his use of the word “import”.

It left me with a vision of hundreds of poets crammed into a container ship in big frilly shirts and with quills clutched in their fists, bearing down on the South Coast. Then, once safely through the UK’s soft-touch immigration controls, they’re loaded onto lorries and distributed to bustling market towns, where they’re met by the red-faced inhabitants who stumble blinking from their homes, garden fork raised in one hand and a copy of Right Ho, Jeeves in the other.