In July, Sojan Joseph, a nurse hailing from Onamthuruthu, a village near Ettumanoor in Kerala’s Kottayam district, made history by becoming the first Malayali to become a member of parliament in the UK.
Joseph’s historic election happened at a crucial time from a Kerala perspective since the southern state has been witnessing a steady outflow of students to the UK, many of them eyeing an opportunity to settle there. Joseph, the Labour Party MP who represents the Ashford constituency which has been a stronghold of the Conservative Party for long, is not too happy with the trend. He has no doubt that one should not look at a student visa as a means to migrate. His advice to those who aim to settle in that country is to find the right course required for the job opportunities available there.
In an interview with Onmanorama, Joseph talks about his entry into politics, his views on student migration, the nursing scenario in the UK and the immediate future of India-UK relations. Edited excerpts:
In brief, yours is the story of a Kottayam boy studying nursing, going to the UK, making a mark in the health sector there and then becoming an MP there. How did this happen?
I went to the UK to work in the hospitals there, to work as a nurse in the mental health sector. Politics was not there in my mind at all. Then during my career there as a nurse, I started to identify some issues that matter to the common man there, especially the people who seek help through the National Health Service (NHS) and how the services were going down.
And it made me think how we can make some changes in the health sector. And that's how I end up joining the party.
In 2015, I worked with the local party, stood in the local election and everything in my mind was how you can make a difference to people's lives on issues like the cost of living, the NHS, the infrastructure, the economy.
At the same time, you think about nursing as a profession and how you can retain people in the NHS. People were leaving. Not many people were choosing nursing as a career. So the whole idea of joining politics was to make a difference to people.
How could you make inroads into the constituency which has been with the Conservatives for so long?
The campaign strategy was mostly to go and talk to people, knock the door and talk to the people in person. We can't reach every house, but we tried and I think I may have knocked around 8000 doors and we had a very good group of volunteers who were very committed.
And halfway through the election, we thought people were looking for a change.
Did your experience of seeing election campaigns back in Kerala help you in any way in your electoral race?
The election campaign in Kerala is completely different to what is in the UK. It's mostly based on the policies the parties put forward to the people. So we put together our manifesto and then locally, we identify the issues as their candidate for the local constituency.
You talk to the people about what you are going to do. You put your policy forward and people decide who they want to elect. We don't have loud speakers or big posters out on the roads, so it's much more quieter. I would say it's a more civilised way of campaigning there.
Your election comes at a crucial time if you look at it from Kerala's perspective. Of late, we have been seeing a large outflow of students from Kerala to the UK. Some call it a natural trend, given Kerala's track record in higher education and migration. On the other side, some call it brain drain or distress migration. As someone who has been staying in the UK for over two decades, how do you look at this current trend?
This is a top discussion point in UK as well. We got very good colleges and children getting very good education, and the UK got world famous universities, not just the Cambridge and Oxford, but there are several universities where the children can get really good education, world class education. My view is the students should come and study if they can, but that's for studying. If you can get a higher education from a UK university, it can be very useful.
But the issue is, according to the trend we have seen recently, some students use student visas as a way of migrating to the UK and they want to stay there permanently. Student visa is for you to go and study and they offer like two years stay back. The students are expected to return to their home countries after studies. So you come back equipped with more skills that should benefit India and Kerala.
UK doesn't offer a (work) visa for every student there. The UK takes people if they need a professional there, like we have something called shortage occupation list. The list provides the professionals that the UK is in shortage of.
For example, if you are going to study nursing, you are more likely to get a work visa to stay there because we do have vacancies for nurses.
I believe you must have had some opportunity to interact with some of these students. If so, have they been able to find the right kind of places to study and if not, what will happen to them?
I have seen a lot of students there. I have seen students struggling to find an accommodation and a part-time job. The reason they're struggling is they're not actually there to study.
Some students don't choose the right courses. They choose a course so that they can get there and then they struggle because you spend a lot of money and their aim is to make some money while they study. And if they can't get enough hours of part-time job, then they expect their parents to send more money to keep them there.
During the previous government's time, there have been reports of the government planning to bring in some restrictions on student visas. What is the current status?
The current government has not made any changes to the migration rules for the students at this stage. There's no restriction on student visas at the moment. That will be reviewed in the near future.
As a Malayali, who has been in the UK's healthcare sector for over two decades, how do you look at the evolution of the Kerala nursing community there? Is their scope still growing?
Nurses from Kerala have been migrating to UK since around 2000. And as you know, you go anywhere in the world, you can see Keralite nurses doing really well. I used to say Kerala is a home of nurses. In the UK, you can see Malayali nurses in every NHS hospital and nursing homes.
They do a brilliant job, they have made a good reputation, they're hardworking, dedicated and especially in the UK, you got a lot of opportunity to develop your career as well. So the UK was the first choice for nurses to migrate. But over the recent years, some of the issues like cost of living, lack of salary increase (have popped up). Lots of nurses have decided to leave to countries like Australia. So it does cost a lot of money for the NHS to bring nurses from Kerala. Most of those recruitments are free recruitments. If we cannot retain those nurses, it's not going to be sustainable in the long term. The priority for the current government is to train more local nurses.
But it's going to take some time. Each nurse is going to take three years to be trained and then their induction will take you four to five years before you get an experienced nurse. In the meantime, we still need to rely on the foreign recruitment to fill the gaps.
Do you think this push for more native professionals will affect chances of nurses from other countries?
I don't think so. The reason I'm saying that is we still need lot more nurses in the health sector. Not just nurses within the health sector.
There are still quite a lot of vacancies that need to be filled. So it's going to take some time and also to attract the local students to come into the health sector we will need a bit of time.
As I said, the cost of living and the perception of nurses being underpaid have put people off from the profession. As a nurse in the parliament, my priority will be to support the government to develop more nurses within the system so that the NHS will be properly staffed.
If you look at the recent past, the UK has been seeing some kind of political instability. And after all that, now you have a strong government in place. A new government, of course a continuity, has assumed power in India also. In this situation, what is the present and the future of Indo-UK relations?
Improving India-UK relationship is one of the priorities for the new government. India and UK are natural partners. This has been going for years. So the previous government started some process of improving the relationship between India and UK, especially after the Brexit. The UK is looking towards countries like India and other developing countries to improve our relationship.
An improving relationship between India and UK is going to benefit both countries in fields like tourism. I mean, especially in Kerala because the state is very popular among British tourists. Also a lot more people from India now visit London and UK. Places like Kent, which is a place with natural beauty, could attract a lot more tourists. In both ways, it's going to benefit both countries, UK and India.