The Graun will still cover a labyrinthine talking shop

The Graun has a muddled piece today by J Rayner

The post-Brexit immigration system is a threat to the food industry – and a snobbish failure to understand the value of people who do jobs that benefit us all

The piece opens with Rayner reminding us how skilled waiters can be (in elite restaurants especially). This means they should not be labelled as unskilled in any immigration legislation....'more than a third of people working in hospitality and catering in London are EU nationals, and 80% of them would not be eligible to work here under the new rules.'

A difficult issue emerges though:

Just as with personal care work, which requires huge reserves of patience, empathy and, yes, skill, jobs in hospitality are often terribly underpaid. But a person’s value is so much more than the size of their pay packet

So why are they underpaid exactly? Is there a connection with their being European immigrants? Why have they not been abe to have their skills recognised not just by appreciative gourmets but in the form of hard cash? Knowledge of this situation happily has not diminished Rayner's 'pleasure of a meal in a restaurant'. Good job they are not French waiters acting in bad faith to embarrass customers.

Rather than address those issues, Rayner pursues another agenda:

Those of us who have already made clear our opposition to the myopic, inward-looking Brexit project can again rehearse our arguments about the value of freedom of movement; we can explain how it increases opportunity for all, adds to the cultural diversity of the nation and enriches us. But that will merely be met with a shout of: “We’ve left; get over it.”

Talking of mixed agendas, The Graun continues to laud its Europe reporting venture:

 After 50 years of largely hostile reporting, journalists may find themselves pushed to the sidelines

• Support the Guardian’s European journalism today by making a contribution or subscribing

The combination says it all.

UK political reporting culture prides itself on keeping a sense of distance, holding power to account. But for much of the UK’s 50 years of membership, British coverage of the EU seemed so confrontational as to lose all sense of perspective....with the UK relegated to the sidelines, will the Eurosceptic British press just disengage or gloat at every setback? Post-Brexit, collective decisions taken by the EU27 will continue to have a profound impact across the European economic space. Britain will be affected. Will its press be watching?

Daniel Boffey, the Guardian’s Brussels bureau chief, says a narrowly focused UK media could find its access to the corridors of power in Brussels receding in time....Boffey believes that the Guardian’s huge readership, broad European appeal and stated commitment to cover pan-European affairs in all their complexity will guarantee its relevance. 

 Interesting snippets from veteran reporters:

The UK drove hard for the single market. But then it began to assume a dynamic of its own – you could see it would eventually lead to a single currency.”...British diplomats also became “aghast”, Palmer recalls, to see that Bavarians, Catalans and other autonomous regions had their own “governments” represented in the EU’s committee of the regions....Palmer blames the democratic deficit on a decision by national governments deliberately to keep the directly elected European parliament weak

The paradox was that the EU was attacked for ruling people’s lives, when the opposite was true. “In a way, the problem is that it is so diffuse it’s very difficult to get a decision through,” Bates says.

But this need not be a paradox if the EC is a talking shop doing lots of masterly inaction while real decisions are taken elsewhere. Were people's lives ruled with no accountability  or not by 'Europe'?