Labour 'Was Wrong' On Immigration
Updated: 5:59am UK, Tuesday 15 October 2013
By Jeff Randall, Sky News Business Presenter
Since Ed Miliband became leader, the Labour Party has tried to reformulate its stance on immigration.
The new approach contains an admission that the last government "got it wrong", largely because it did not listen to the people's concerns, in particular those of Labour supporters such as Gillian Duffy, who was dismissed by Gordon Brown as a "bigoted woman" simply for airing her anxieties.
That ghastly moment grabbed the headlines, but the flaw in the Blair-Brown immigration policy was far more fundamental than the casual traducing of a Rochdale voter who dared to challenge an angst-ridden Prime Minister.
From 2002 to 2010, Labour opened the United Kingdom's doors to more than 500,000 legal incomers a year.
At the same time, it launched a propaganda offensive to persuade us that immigration on this scale would not only make us all better off, because it expanded national output by £6bn a year, but also help solve our long-term pensions crisis, because diligent newcomers would pay into the nation's retirement pot, which an ageing indigenous population was rapidly exhausting.
These were fallacies masquerading as serious politics. Neither element was true, as a House of Lords report, The Economic Impact of Immigration, made clear in 2008. Its conclusion was, in effect, the British public had been sold a false prospectus.
Yes, mass immigration increases GDP, but not GDP per head, because the expanded cake has to be shared amongst many more people.
As for pensions, the arrival of half a million overseas workers a year merely delays the day of reckoning, because they too will grow old and need retirement care. Expecting ever greater numbers of immigrants to keep the system in credit is to have faith in a Ponzi scheme.
That's not to say immigration changes nothing. For the employer class, it provides a ready supply of child-minders, cleaners and plumbers who are grateful for a job and prepared to work for the minimum wage. Life for the rich improves.
But, as Cambridge University economist Professor Robert Rowthorn points out: "It does not benefit indigenous, unskilled Britons who have to compete with immigrants willing to work hard for very low wages in unpleasant conditions."
What's more, British companies have little incentive to train domestic workers if they able to import foreign staff with higher skills and a stronger work ethic.
Then there is Britain's chronic housing shortage. This is not the fault of immigrants, but it's disingenuous to pretend that 176,000 net arrivals (the figure for 2012) do not make an acute problem even worse. They do, after all, have to live somewhere.
Some arrive with enough wealth to buy homes in desirable neighbourhoods. But the vast majority end up competing for space on the lower rungs of the property ladder, where working-class Britons are already struggling to make ends meet.
It was, says Professor Rowthorn, bizarre that Labour, ostensibly the party of the poor and vulnerable, endorsed a policy which created, as Marx put it, a "reserve army of labour", whose presence ensures that bottom-end pay rates are suppressed.
Ed Miliband, it seems, now recognises his predecessors' blunder.
:: Immigration UK: A week of special coverage on Sky from October 14 to 18 - watch on Sky 501, Virgin Media 602, Freesat 202, Freeview 82, Skynews.com and Sky News for iPad.
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