Nelson's Column: What on earth is the point of Priti Patel's points system?

If you speak English give yourself 10 points.

A PhD adds another ten – although weirdly an A-level scores twice as many marks as a doctorate.

All three and you’re up to 40 points.

If you’ll be able to earn £25,600 a year that’s 20 points, and a firm job offer adds another twenty.

Congratulations. You’ve just notched up 10 points more than the minimum 70 needed to make you eligible to live in the UK.

But Priti Patel’s new Australian-style immigration points system will be bad news for low skilled EU workers as seven in ten won’t make the grade.

Bang goes our ready supply of social care assistants, catering staff and Uber drivers.

But, hey, the good news from the Home Secretary is that those jobs can be done by British workers.

That’s all very well but ministers also boast that employment is booming and vacancies growing, so there will be vast swathes of the economy where jobs go unfilled.

Britain is crying out for unskilled labour. We have plenty of foreign football managers but not enough fruit pickers.

Care workers are unskilled. But 104,000 of them from the EU and another 120,000 from elsewhere look after the elderly and vulnerable.

With one in ten care jobs vacant, the Patel system could spell catastrophe for our ageing population.

And we’re going to need more not fewer.

The number of people aged over 85 will double from 1.6 million to 3.2 million in 25 years. In 50 years it will treble.

The scientists, engineers, and academics Ms Patel wants to attract are welcome, but a quantum physicist or analytical chemist is not going to mop floors or wipe bottoms in a nursing home.

The Home Secretary says: “Employers will need to adjust.”

What? Adjust to mucking out the staff khazi themselves?

Ms Patel breezily says labour shortages could be plugged by the 8.45 million people who are “economically inactive”.

That doesn’t mean lazy. It means being a student, sick, a pensioner or carer.

Ms Patel cannot seriously be thinking of dragging them out of college, hospital beds, retirement or letting loved ones starve to death.

You might as well bring back Victorian workhouses while you’re at it, Ms Patel.

The error in copying Australia is that we’re not comparable countries.

Australia is big with a small population while Britain is small with a big one so our needs are different.

That’s why Theresa May dismissed this idea as unworkable in 2010 when she was Home Secretary.

HGV drivers are bizarrely classified Down Under as unskilled.

But surely it takes skill to drive a 44 ton lorry. I have enough trouble with my Vauxhall Astra.

It’s the kind of anomaly the Australian system throws up. So in 2002 hairdressing was a skilled job while window fitting was not.

Twelve years later it was the other way round. That wasn’t because cutting hair had become easier or putting glass into holes harder.

It was simply that by 2018 Australia had too many crimpers and not enough window wallahs, and by changing this peculiar criteria they adjusted the intake.

We already have a points system for migrants, Tier 1 includes foreign fatcats whose dosh we want, tier 2 for the high-skilled and shortage occupations.

The unskilled tier 3 was scrapped in 2013 because free movement meant this non-EU migrant labour wasn’t needed.

My mate Phil Woolas, the Labour immigration minister who designed the tiers, says they could be used post-Brexit to only admit unskilled workers who’ll do the jobs Brits don’t want.

Much simpler than this complex kangaroo scheme.

Which earns Priti no points.

Turning a crisis into a drama

The 9 o’clock Sunday evening slot on BBC1 used to be THE place to find great drama.

The Night Manager was exceptional, the more recent The Trial of Christine Keeler pretty good.

But nowadays viewers can find plenty of brilliant drama elsewhere. Sky Atlantic’s Chernobyl, for example, or The Stranger on Netflix.

But now that Boris Johnson is gunning for the BBC the Corporation is at a crossroads. It must decide what it’s for.

Whether hugely popular shows such as Strictly. Or BBC3 experiments where Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag got its first outing. Or high-brow interests on BBC4.

Personally I’d like the BBC to show more of what can’t be seen elsewhere, but I concede that might not appeal to the majority of licence payers.

Boris’s sinister sidekick Dominic Cummings used to work for a think tank which wanted TV deregulated so channels like the rabid right-wing US Fox News could broadcast here.

Gawd save us. The BBC’s independent, impartial and balanced news coverage is respected worldwide.

And there are always newspapers if you want forthright opinion.

So I do hope we can all agree that no matter which way the Beeb goes its news output must be preserved at all costs.

Contraceptive shortage

I don’t need a crystal ball to foretell a baby boom in the run up to Christmas.

Minister Jo Churchill says “manufacturing problems” are causing a shortage of contraceptives.

Why South Koreans are happier here

New figures show that last year 44,000 dogs were imported into the UK, nearly 20,000 of them from Romania alone and another 5,000 from Germany.

But it is the 30 who arrived from South Korea who must be most grateful for our hospitality.

Where they come from they’re called Dinner.

Marching with Pride

It’s 20 years since the ban on LGBT people serving in the military was lifted. Now Defence minister Johnny Mercer has apologised for it not being ended earlier.

But I do wonder how crusty old colonels will feel when ordered to turn out to mark this anniversarry by taking part in such events as Pride, Transgender Day of Visibility, Transgender Day of Remembrance, National Coming Out Day and hoisting rainbow flags.

I hope what they will feel is pride.