Labour lied about its immigration policy and then rushed to lavish bennies on the new arrivals at the expense of natural-born British subjects, including those who actually fought for the United Kingdom
Ed Miliband has tried to atone for Iraq, but his party’s open-door policy is impossible to excuse
By
Jeff Randall
Britain’s greatest foreign affairs disaster since Suez, the invasion of Iraq,
was facilitated by a fraudulent document: the dodgy dossier on weapons of
mass destruction. Last week, Ed Miliband tried to purge that shame from
Labour’s system by orchestrating the vote against this country’s military
involvement in Syria.
The Opposition leader, it seems, wants his party to be in the
truth-and-reconciliation business. If that’s the case, then it’s time for Mr
Miliband not just to acknowledge the past mistakes of Labour’s open-door
immigration policy, which he has already done, but explain the brazen
dishonesty and cynical deceptions that were used to justify a crucial
element of Gordon Brown’s domestic economic strategy.
Labour MP Jon Cruddas admits that “historians will look back on the past few
decades and identify immigration as perhaps the major change to our
country.” Not everyone thinks it is a change for the better. According to a
weekend poll of 20,000 people, 60 per cent believe immigration has brought
more disadvantages than advantages. Under Blair and Brown, Labour’s approach
to immigration was voodoo economics masquerading as respectable politics.
Its 2005 manifesto, all 112 pages, was a masterpiece of obfuscation,
devoting just 16 lines to “Migration: the facts”.
Instead of setting out the possible consequences of a policy that would result
in 1.5 million net (legal) immigrants in seven years, 2004-2010, it simply
stated: “Skilled migrants are contributing 10-15 per cent of our economy’s
growth”. No mention of housing shortages, pressures on schools or anything
else remotely negative. The rest was a red herring about how much business
visitors and tourists spend in Britain, which has nothing to do with
immigration, and a wholly misleading paragraph on asylum seekers, creating
an impression that Labour was on top of the problem.
This was a false prospectus. Had similar claims been made by company
directors, they would be facing a ban from corporate life. After the 2005
election had been won, Home Secretary John Reid came clean, damning his
department’s immigration operation as “not fit for purpose”. Strange, isn’t
it, that such a glaring flaw was overlooked in the run-up to polling day.
Be sure to read: The Truth At Last! Peter Mandelson
Admits Labour 'Sent Out Search Parties' To Bring Migrants Here After Losing The
Votes Of The Working Class
There are, I accept, some economic benefits from high levels of immigration.
They come, however, with significant costs, which were either ignored or
deliberately distorted by a Labour leadership that was determined to suck in
millions of foreigners, knowing that the outcome would be irreversible.
Setting aside its lust for multiculturalism, Labour’s financial case for mass
immigration was that it increased annual GDP, thereby making all of us
better off. In 2007, Liam Byrne, then immigration minister, told a Commons
committee, “migration added about £6 billion to national output, which is
quite a big number”. The other important Labour claim was that because the
vast majority of legal immigrants were young, worked hard and paid taxes,
they helped fill Britain’s long-term pensions hole. What’s more, through the
magic of Mr Brown’s debt-fuelled growth trick, immigrants posed no threat to
local workers’ jobs or wages. Those who challenged this fallacy were
dismissed as bigots.
It was all an illusion. Mr Byrne’s big number was cancelled out by another
big number – 200,000 — the average annual net immigration during Labour’s
third term. Yes, output went up but GDP per head did not because the cake
had to be shared amongst many more people. Britain’s population was soaring.
Size does not equal prosperity, yet they were deliberately conflated by
Labour to give the impression of a universal upside from unprecedented
immigration. This deceit was exposed by an all-party House of Lords
committee in 2008, whose chairman demolished Labour’s arguments as
“preposterous and irrelevant”.
That is not to say there are no winners from the injection of a very large
number of workers into the economy. It acts, in effect, like a King John
tax, transferring resources from the poor to the rich. For the employer
class, in particular London’s metropolitan elite, immigration provides a
ready supply of nannies, ironing ladies and odd-job men willing to work for
the minimum wage.
By contrast, for locals at the bottom of the employment ladder, the impact is
deleterious. According to Cambridge University’s Professor Robert Rowthorn,
it’s bizarre that the Labour Party, champion of the vulnerable (or so it
claims), intentionally created what Marx called “a reserve army of labour”:
a pool of workers whose presence ensures that rates of pay for unskilled
staff can be kept low.
As for the argument that immigrants defuse our pensions time bomb, only those
who think Ponzi schemes are sustainable could believe it. The Lords report
concluded that the proposition did “not stand up to scrutiny”. Flooding the
country with young overseas workers merely delays the day of reckoning,
because, of course, they too will grow old and need pensions. But who will
pay for them? Exponential population growth cannot be the answer.
Labour’s presentation of immigration was a bit like Bob Maxwell’s report and
accounts: the focus was always on the assets with barely a mention of
liabilities. For example, British companies have little incentive to train
domestic employees if they are able to import foreign staff with higher
skills and a stronger work ethic. If Ed Miliband is serious about wiping the
slate, he should tell us what the real motivation was for his party to force
social, cultural and economic upheaval on many British communities without
ever consulting them.
I think I know the answer.
Related Reading:
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