One of my reservations about a hard Brexit was that any subsequent government would be in a hurry to sign virtually any trade deal to make up the losses, including one with India in exchange for visa liberalisation. It now looks like that fear was well founded. Boris Johnson on Wednesday opened the door to increased immigration from India to the UK in exchange for a trade deal as he prepared to meet Narendra Modi, the country’s prime minister.

Johnson said he hoped to strike a trade deal “by the end of the year” and that he had “always been in favour of having people come to this country”. “We have a massive shortage in the UK, not least in experts in IT and programmers,” Mr Johnson said. “We’re short to the tune of hundreds of thousands in our economy.”

That Britain has a skills gap is no excuse to rely on immigration. That should have been the lesson from Brexit. As with many other industries, IT companies have failed to provide adequate training while demanding impossible levels of skill for mediocre pay. That is at the root of its recruitment woes. Moreover, as the economy contracts, the last thing Brits need is more cheap competition for good jobs. That the PM is in favour of more third world migration shows just how deeply out of touch he is. The vast majority of Brits already think the Tories are failing on immigration.

Writing in The Telegraph, Jeremy Warner notes that India’s continued cosying up to Putin’s Russia, and in particular its refusal to condemn Putin’s murderous assault on Ukraine, is an affront to common decency that places Modi firmly in the same camp as Xi Jinping’s China – a completely unacceptable state of affairs that raises serious questions about whether India is actually a part of the democratised world in the first place.

Even leaving that issue aside there are a great many reasons to have reservations about a trade deal with India – particularly where IT and services are concerned being that India is one of the most corrupt countries on earth with little in the way of data safeguarding. Data theft is a massive problem in India, as are fake medical and technical qualifications and counterfeiting. Goods are often produced using stolen intellectual property and safety certification is often falsified. Fraud and corruption is endemic to the culture.

A deal with India offers Britons very little. As Warner notes, British hopes of dismantling non-tariff barriers to trade, allowing the UK’s high value-added professional and financial service industries access to the Indian market are a complete non-starter, and though inroads into very high Indian tariffs on scotch whisky and cars is obviously worth something, it is not a game-changer nor noticeable for the economy as a whole. It will barely register. What will register with the public is yet another influx of low wage labour.

The post-Brexit immigration system could have been designed exactly with Sunak’s father-in-law in mind. Infosys have for years been demanding the changes which were ultimately made. But it may even be more sinister than that. The Tories are actively pitching for the Indian vote, and have become electorally dependent on it, to counter the Pakistani Muslims who tend to vote Labour. This, effectively, is gerrymandering, encouraging a flood of immigrants who are more likely to vote Tory.

A vote to end freedom of movement was not a vote to fling open our borders to the rest of the world. But now we’re going to increase pressure on housing and public services to save Tory skins in urban marginals. How is this in the interests of anybody living in Britain, let alone the British people? Between Net Zero and the Dover dinghies fiasco, Johnson has repeatedly demonstrated he has turned his back on his core voters. The British public are once again last in the pecking order.