This shameful dogwhistling over the India trade deal

Jenrick knew what he was doing with this post, which had accumulated more than a million views in less than a day. Without ever explicitly saying it, Jenrick implied Starmer was doing special deals to allow more migrants – coincidentally from a country where people mostly have brown skin – and to allow employers to hire them more cheaply than Brits, thanks to a new and unacceptable form of tax break.

The reality, unsurprisingly, is quite different. While in practice national insurance goes into the same general tax pot as any other tax revenue, its payment is connected to the right to claim a state pension – which can make it somewhat unfair to companies who would wish to bring staff members from their home country to work in the UK for a few short years, especially if that would affect their eligibility to claim a pension in their home country.

As a result, trade deals routinely include provisions that allow companies and their employees to pay national insurance (or other taxes) in their home country instead of the UK, alongside other measures to avoid “double taxation”. This is a completely routine part of trade agreements signed by the UK, and is included in deals with dozens of countries (including the USA) already.

What Jenrick was trying to make out was unusual or outrageous is, in fact, entirely normal – and doesn’t save employers any money versus hiring a Brit. India’s equivalent of national insurance is set at a similar rate to the UK’s, and the company must demonstrate it is being paid there to avoid the tax here. Similarly, a worker paying national insurance to India rather than the UK accrues no eligibility towards a UK pension over that time.

Jenrick’s follow-up claim that the trade deal – which again, his party has promised for a decade or more – would “encourage even more immigration” – was largely dishonest, too. The UK gets to set its own visa criteria and quotas and decide who is and isn’t allowed in, none of which is superseded by this deal.

And in any case, the new tax arrangements don’t apply to Indians applying for regular job vacancies in the UK. It is only for Indians who are seconded to Britain from a company based in India on a short-term basis.

Even by the standards of 2025, the dishonesty and venality of Jenrick’s move here, since followed up by many of his Conservative colleagues, is worthy of note. It is less a dogwhistle than a foghorn, relying on misleading the public into thinking a relatively routine and longstanding mutual tax agreement is something new and appalling. 

This is not the sort of tactic routinely deployed by the Conservatives, or even by Reform – this sort of thing is usually reserved for the online far right. Jenrick has opened a door that leads to a very dark place indeed, and he will soon find he is no more able to control what he has unleashed than anyone else was. We all reap what politicians sow, and Jenrick is sowing some deeply toxic seeds with wild abandon.

There are no shortage of reasons to doubt whether or not the UK should be signing a trade deal with India at this particular moment, not least given the country seems to be recklessly escalating its dispute with Pakistan into something close to open warfare. Maliciously weaponised disinformation on immigration and taxation is not one of them.

Robert Jenrick is a man without shame, which is hardly new information. What is sad is how few people within his own party seem to have the guts to call him out. 

Their failure to do so will only accelerate the party’s slide into the fringes, and into irrelevance. However hard Jenrick tries, he will not beat Farage at his own game.