Hello and welcome. My name is Sophia Bash and you're listening to the CER podcast.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. Today I'm in conversation with John Springford, who is director of research here at the Center for European Reform and Camino Matera Martinez who's calling

in from Brussels where she's the eyes and ears of the CEA. Welcome both. Hi, Sophia. Hi,

the beginning of this week we've had the toy party conference and quite a lot of extreme

rhetoric about the rights of EU migrants in the UK after Brexit.

And I think the first question that I want to start out with is how serious should we be taking

these remarks by Liam Fox, by Home Secretary Amber Rudd and by the Prime Minister

Theresa May herself, John?

I mean, we should be taking them seriously politically, I think, not necessarily as policy

proposals.

You know, Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, said that the UK government is thinking about

making companies disclose the number of foreign staff that they have.

And obviously, there was a huge backlash against this when she announced this on Sunday.

And she subsequently backtracked a bit and said, you know, this is just one option that we're considering.

And, you know, Theresa May, when she said that, you know, foreign doctors in the UK who are working for the NHS may have to go after 2025 because the government is going to train up lots of doctors and therefore make the NHS self-sufficient.

I think we should also not really take that too seriously because she also backtracked a bit. She said in an interview

afterwards that this didn't necessarily mean that foreign doctors would have to leave and

we're just looking for to train more UK doctors. What they're trying to do is signal to the

Tory Party faithful and to the public at large that they're going to get tough on immigration.

But I don't necessarily think that these policy announcements will become policy.

Camino, John has talked about the signaling in a domestic context.

So what are these Tory politicians trying to tell their own constituencies?

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