Net foreign immigration under Labour was over three million yet their leader’s only reference to immigration in his Conference speech was a single sentence:
“And we have seen immigration policy which didn’t work for the people whose jobs, living standards and communities were affected”.
“They didn’t see it. They caused it”, said Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migration Watch UK. “The only question is whether it was deliberate or simply incompetence or both. It is shameful that this is all Miliband now has to say about Labour’s most lasting legacy to our society, despite the widespread public concern about mass immigration.”
Meanwhile, the shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has been making lame excuses on the Today Programme. First she implied that the problem was due to East European migration when at most only a fifth of Labour’s three million immigrants came from Eastern Europe. Then she said that Italy and Spain had recently seen much higher net migration than the UK. This is simply a red herring. What she failed to mention was that both those countries have a very low birth rate so their populations would fall without immigration. By contrast, in the UK our population would be roughly stable without immigration while at presently projected levels it will take our population to 70 million within 20 years, equivalent to seven cities the size of Birmingham, with two thirds of the increase due to immigration. Nor did Ms Cooper mention that youth unemployment in Italy is now 28% and Spain it is over 40%.