by Georgina Mumford, spiked
Why does the Home Office’s definition of ‘global talent’ extend to men in fishnets and dodgy wigs?
For decades, Britain’s political parties of all stripes have promised to prioritise ‘high skilled’ immigration. Yet with more than 930,000 skilled-worker visas handed out between 2021 and 2024, it seems the Home Office is throwing out stamped passports the way Oprah hands out Audis: And you get a visa! And you get a visa! One explanation for this might be that the UK government’s definition of ‘skilled’ has become impossibly broad.
Nowhere is this clearer than when it comes to the ‘Global Talent’ visa, intended to attract the cream of the crop of creatives to live and work in the UK. Acts have to be approved for their artistic merit by the Home Office and the Arts Council. Yet rather than rolling out the red carpet to top-tier artistic talent, we seem to have ended up welcoming a curious number of drag queens. The kinds of acts whose ‘skills’ – let’s face it – tend to be little more than lip-syncing, wearing women’s clothes and applying garish make-up.