Bangladeshi restaurant owners in Britain have expressed anger over what they see as the UK government’s Brexit turnaround.
Many of them, who run curry restaurants, had voted for Britain to leave the European Union in the June 2016 referendum based on promises from leading MPs that Brexit would mean chefs from Bangladesh would be prioritized over EU immigrants with no training in cooking curry.
However, it has emerged that as part of ongoing Brexit negotiations, the preferential treatment for EU migrants over those from countries like Bangladesh is set to continue even after Britain leaves the EU.
This would further undermine hopes for special temporary measures to bring in trained chefs as migrants from Bangladesh.
“On many occasions, we recall [UK Foreign Secretary and prominent Brexit campaigner] Boris Johnson and others say it was very important that we could bring in chefs from outside the EU because the market needed it. But now it seems as if nobody is entertaining the idea,” said Enam Ali, founder of the British Curry Awards.
According to his analysis, nearly 50% of all curry restaurants – around 6,000 – are expected to permanently shut down within 10 years due to a lack of qualified staff.
He has been campaigning on the issue for many years and written to the UK government in the past calling for tightly-controlled temporary visas for chefs to come to the UK and train local staff in the traditional style of cooking curry.
Last year, Ali, born in Sylhet before moving to the UK in the 1970s to study, also founded Le Raj Academy in partnership with North East Surrey College of Technology (NESCOT) in Epsom, Surrey, to train the next generation of curry chefs.
“Every day one or two more restaurants close down and in most cases, it is because they cannot find the skilled staff,” said Mitu Chowdhury, from the Bangladesh Caterers’ Association, which has also been campaigning over the issue.
The restaurant owners have found the backing of Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable who has called for “vindaloo visas” or a temporary scheme to address the crisis in the country’s £3.6-billion curry industry.
“If there was any doubt beforehand, the shortage of curry chefs is now a crisis … The curry industry is rightly aggrieved by Brexiteer false promises that a vote to leave [the EU] would mean more workers, including chefs, from South Asia could come into the country because there would be fewer EU workers. This has not materialized,” Cable said.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
