British jobs for British workers?

The Government are wiping statistical egg off their faces again.

Up until this week, we were being told that only 0.8 million foreign migrants had come to work in the UK, while the labour market had grown by 2.7m new jobs. Now the Government has had to revise both figures, admitting that in fact 1.1m new migrants had entered Britain, while only 2.1m new jobs had been created. Far from creating "British jobs for British workers," it appears that Gordon Brown has been creating British jobs for foreign workers.

Except that it's all tosh, of course.

For one thing, Gordon Brown has created only about a couple of hundred thousand new jobs, largely by employing new civil servants, nurses and other public sector employees. Most of the 2.1m new jobs were created in spite of Labour efforts rather than because of them. They are private sector jobs, and a good job too.

But what of Brown's supposed crackdown on migrant labour? Does it matter that 52% of the new jobs have gone to migrants? And who is to blame?

The crackdown on migrant labour is boneheaded Labour nonsense and should be treated with disdain. A real policy of creating "British jobs for British workers" would be illegal under European law, and even if one would rather be out of the European Union it remains an ignorant and self-defeating policy. 1.1m workers are 1.1m workers, whether they come from Portsmouth, Poland or Peru. As long as they work hard they are creating value for the whole community; as long as they earn and spend they are creating jobs for other - mostly British - people; and as long as they are paying taxes they are contributing to the schools and hospitals that we all use.

That these "British jobs" could have gone to "British workers" is of course true, but it is not as though British workers could not have filled them. There are 1.65m unemployed in the UK, and one has to wonder why so many remain unemployed if we have had to import 1.1m workers from abroad to fill the vacancies. The explanation comes from debunking three myths:

1. Jobs are not created by ministers and civil servants. They are created by businesses that can see a way of turning labour into profit. If they can hire a person and generate more capital than they need pay in wages, it is worth their creating a job. Those jobs were potentially there as long as people were willing to work at that price. It is the availability of foreign labour prepared to work at those prices that created those jobs.
2. Britain's unemployed were more than welcome to apply for those jobs. Many may have done so; many more did not. There have been numerous managers interviewed for TV and the papers who have stated that they have offered jobs in areas of high unemployment for years and local people have not applied.
3. We would not have created 2.1m jobs if 1.1m foreigners had not come here to work. As noted above, they spend their wages in our shops, require us to hire our teachers and use products made by our manufacturers. A significant part of those 2.1m jobs are feedback; many of those 2.1m exist because othes within that 2.1m (including within the 1.1m) exist;

The simple truth is that as long as we pay people not to work, we will need to import foreign labour to do the jobs that British people are unwilling to take on. On any day in the UK there are approximately two thirds of a million job vacancies. The problem in the UK is not too many foreign workers; it is too many British people who are not willing to take the jobs that are available.

A slap in the face for Migration Watch

Yesterday I reported that Migration Watch had produced figures claiming that the economic impact of immigration from the 2004 EU accession countries is worth just 4p a day per UK citizen or “less than the equivalent of a small Mars bar a month”.

As I noted in my piece yesterday, Migration Watch’s figures for how much each person has benefited do not correspond with those from the Government, the London School of Economics or the Confederation of British Industry.

Today David Blanchflower, one of the nine members of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, hit out at Migration Watch, pointing out that immigration has been a vital tool in keeping a lid on inflation (which, though rising under Gordon Brown, is still under control). Immigration “has tended to increase supply by more than it has increased demand in the UK (in the short run), and thereby acted to reduce inflationary pressures.”

As for the oft-cited error that immigrants are stealing our jobs or pushing down wages, this is nonsense. Mr. Blanchflower and the two Bank of England economists with whom he co-authored the report, write that “empirical literature from around the world suggests little or no evidence that immigrants have had a major impact on native labour market outcomes such as wages and unemployment.

But the impact of these immigrants on employment has not been neutral. Oh no! It has in fact reduced joblessness: “There seems to be broad agreement that immigration is likely to have reduced the natural rate of unemployment in the UK over the past few years.”

So, just to get this straight, not only have these hard-working taxpayers added 0.5 per cent to GDP and paid £2 billion in taxes in 2005, but they have also kept both unemployment and inflation lower than they would otherwise have been.

Not only does that leave egg on the face of Sir Andrew Green, but it also demonstrates that the Government were stupid not to repeat the trick by allowing Bulgarians and Romanians to join our economy based on need and not bureaucratic bean-counting.

An awful lot of Mars Bars courtesy of the Poles

Matt Davies reminds me that Migration Watch have produced figures on the economic impact of immigration that dispute those produced by HM Government. According to Migration Watch, the economic impact is worth 4p a day per UK citizen or “less than the equivalent of a small Mars bar a month”

Now you've got to admire those Poles. They make it all the way here with millions of fun-sized mars bars on their backs... That's what I call hard working!

The point of Migration Watch’s figures was to dispute Government figures that migrants have contributed 0.5% to GDP over-and-above what would accrue merely by enlarging the population. However, I have a lot more faith in the Government figures – not because I am particularly disposed to believe what comes out of Whitehall, but because they are supported by research from the London School of Economics and have the confidence of the Confederation of British Industry.

These figures not only add up to £5 billion (c. £1.60 per person per week, which under Labour means almost £1 per person that passes through Government hands) but they are also compounded because they are growth figures. In other words, we gain £5 billion in 2005 and £5 billion £100 + annual growth since 2005 every year from hereon in.

That’s a hell of a lot of Mars Bars!

Welcome to Europe; don't come here

Two stories in the news struck me particularly: the accession of two new countries to the EU and Government plans to change the legal age of smoking.

I doubt I am alone in being angered by the government’s decision to limit the number of EU citizens from Romania and Bulgaria entering the UK. As with the 2004 accession countries, the new entrants should enjoy the same free movement of goods, services, capital and labour that the older members enjoy. What is more, anyone who wants to work hard, pay taxes and obey the law should be welcome in our country.

Whether one believes Mr. Brown has been masterful or fortunate in his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the decision not to follow most of our European neighbours in restricting the free flow of labour from the 2004 accession countries was a masterstroke. It has been estimated that Britain has enjoyed a boost of 0.5 per cent of GDP over and above the growth that would accrue simply from a larger population: in other words, our society is £5 billion richer. In Labour’s high-tax society, that means our government is £2 billion richer. That buys a lot of teachers.

Labour’s failure to repeat this trick and gain another one-off dividend by admitting the hard-working taxpayers rejected by our protectionist neighbours is a sign of their weakness. Rather than explain to the electorate why everybody benefits from economic migration, Labour has preferred to bow to ignorance and pander to fear. As a result we have a policy that insults the new members and demeans the old.

Labour isn't working

It’s an old story, but it appears that they’re remaking it again. No, it’s not the BBC dramatisation of Dracula. It’s rising unemployment.

Youth unemployment is particularly troubling. In November this year 11,200 young people had been claiming benefits for more than a year. Youth unemployment is now worse than it was when Labour came to power. Figures from the Office of National Statistics are instructive:

1997 2006 Change
16 – 24 year olds unemployed 665,000 702,000 + 37,000
16 – 24 unemployment rate 14.4% 14.5% + 0.1%
16 – 24 unemployment rate – London 22.5% 42.9% + 20.4%


Labour MPs are rushing to blame the usual suspects – immigrants. With simple but flawed logic they suggest that hundreds of thousands of East Europeans have flooded in and taken jobs that might otherwise be filled by British workers. However, if this were the case, why was it that two thirds of a million 16 – 24 year olds were unemployed before the East Europeans arrived? How has Britain managed to absorb hundreds of thousands of East European workers when unemployment has only risen by tens of thousands?

This scapegoating of hard working, tax paying immigrants is a sordid attempt to shift attention from the real culprits: the Labour government. Youth unemployment is on the rise because Labour has strangled business with masses of extra regulation and rising taxation. It is rising because our schools are still failing to teach basic skills to far too many of our children; a quarter are functionally illiterate, innumerate and leave school at 16 with no qualifications worth speaking of. And it is rising because the government’s New Deal is a disaster, costing more and proving less effective than similar schemes in comparable countries, while massaging the jobless statistics by placing young people in jobs that last less than 13 weeks, so that returning jobless do not appear to be long-term unemployed.

In 1997 Gordon Brown described the levels of youth unemployment that Labour inherited from the Conservatives as “sickening”, a “human tragedy”, “an economic disaster”. After nine years of his chancellorship, it is now worse. It is an old Labour story, and each time we read it we feel the same despair. Labour isn’t working.