“Open for business” is just one of those expressions I dislike.

Partly it’s because it (along with many other comments) uses the metaphor of a business when talking about a country, which is inappropriate for so many reasons – of which one is that a company is a collective and it does have a shared purpose and a single, all-powerful leadership.

But partly it’s a stylistic thing. It’s one of those oft-repeated-rarely-thought-about phrases.

And partly it reminds me of an anti-immigration candidate who kept saying “Britain is closed for business” during a television show where viewers chose a candidate to run for parliament – he won!

Having said that, don’t let my distaste for five words detract from what is otherwise a perfectly good petition!

I agree that the points system is also far from perfect and would go much further than the actual petition if I had the chance. I feel dropping the cap is at least something we can get an effective consensus behind, hence the petition is constrained to that.

I know some won’t like the “open for business” chat but for me it’s as much about emphasising that immigration restrictions are inherently protectionist and close off competition, not just of labour, but of ideas and resources too. From a hyper-pragmatic standpoint that’s bad for the people the cap is supposedly aiming to protect (domestic workers) but from an ideological standpoint it’s bad for all concerned.

I suspect that, much as liberals have strong instincts for breaking down these sorts of barriers and manifestations of state power, we won’t win the war on the ideological front. The sort of people we need to win over to pro-immigration (and, e.g. pro drug decriminalisation) are those whose opposition is derived from their perception of the effects. If you can show them the effects aren’t as they first thought, you’ve probably won them over even if they don’t have a strong ideological opinion about whether it’s right that the state be acting in that way.