Why poets deserve their place on Britain's list of ‘skilled workers' for visa applications

Independent

14 hours ago

So get this: poets are on the Home Office's list of skilled workers, making them eligible for a UK work visa. How do you feel about that? Are you scoffing at the very idea?
Reform's Lee Anderson is most certainly scoffing. It's scoff central over at Red Wall HQ. He's almost as apoplectic about the poets as he is about the inclusion and diversity managers who have also made the list. Not that 30p Lee is anti-literature, no, far from it, it's just that we don't need no foreign poets. No, not here in 'the land of literary giants like Shakespeare and PG Wodehouse,' he declares, adding that as 'a nation with the richest literary tradition in the world, the UK does not need to import poets.'
I doubt Lee Anderson could actually name any of my contemporary poets, but I did enjoy his use of the word 'import.'
It left me with a vision of hundreds of poets crammed into a container ship in big frilly shirts and with quills clutched in their fists, bearing down on the South Coast. Then, once safely through the UK's soft-touch immigration controls, they're loaded onto lorries and distributed to bustling market towns, where they're met by the red-faced inhabitants who stumble blinking from their homes, garden fork raised in one hand and a copy of Right Ho, Jeeves in the other.
Perhaps, as a British poet, I should be thanking 30p Lee for this red-toothed protectionism. Foreign poets, coming over here, taking all our line breaks! I'd better be careful, after all if the imported diversity and inclusion managers get together with the imported poets, white, straight cis male scribblers like me are truly screwed.
And besides, 'what we urgently need,' this bluff voice of reason continues, 'are doctors, builders, and entrepreneurs – people who will contribute directly to our economy and public services.'
Which all sounds very reasonable, doesn't it? What do you want? A doctor to operate on your dying child or a poet to write something YOU CAN'T EVEN UNDERSTAND about autumn? This is how 30p Lee's politics work – they tell us we are in crisis so we have to choose. Choice at the barrel of a gun.
But life isn't black and white, life isn't made up of binary choices. Life is complicated and nuanced, knotty and multifaceted, like the best poetry. Poetry is complex, it reaches deep into our psyche, touches what it is to be human. Poetry and other forms of slow, thoughtful writing are a much needed antidote to the shrill political soapboxing of people like Lee Anderson, and indeed snarky think pieces like this one.
And let's just put to bed this idea that the arts don't contribute to our economy. The UK's creative industries are worth £125bn, and even we humble poets play our part. Poetry book sales topped £14.4m in 2023, the highest since records began.
And whilst it's fun to dismiss poets as either floppy haired Byrons or modern day versions of Rik Mayall's People's Poet, we are in truth grafters. This is my job. I support my family, I pay my mortgage with poetry. I write a new show every year and take it to tens of thousands of people in hundreds of arts centres, theatres and major festivals like Glastonbury and Latitude.
And yes, I sometimes get a work visa and tour overseas. It's all part of the great exchange of poets and writers that has always taken place. Writers travel to experience the world, to meet people, to swap ideas, to celebrate our different cultural experiences and the things that unite us as human beings. In the UK we are lucky to welcome poets to these shores each year to electrify us with their words and ideas, enrich our culture, and yes, contribute to our economy.
Of course poets are skilled workers, and they belong on that Home Office list. Poets have spent years honing their craft, thinking deeply about human nature. The best poetry can profoundly change us. We reach for poems when we can't find our own words, we rely on them at funerals, weddings, and times of deep crisis to say what we feel but somehow can't articulate. In this way poets advocate for all of us, as much as any politician.