Immigration

Putting Ed Balls into Home Affairs is like trapping a bee in a jar: he’ll come out furious, and anxious to sting. In his new brief, he has immigration. And he’ll know Cameron’s vulnerabilities. The greatest threat facing the coalition doesn’t come from Ed Miliband. It comes from a deep dysfunction in Britain’s economy: that when it grows, we just suck in more workers from overseas. Balls knows this, and the resentment it causes in affected communities – which is why he was talking tough on immigration during the leadership contest. He knows where the economic bodies are buried: he dug the graves. He also knows that unless Cameron manages

I wonder if Theresa May felt faintly apprehensive this morning. It must bad enough to awake and remember that you’re the Home Secretary, held responsible for every immigrant, every strike and every crime committed in Britain. Northern Ireland is more poisoned ministerial chalice, just. Now, she is being shadowed by Ed Balls, a ravening attack-dog liberated by the opposition. Balls has re-invented himself as a traditional Labour politician, casting himself as the champion of the working class. He says, accurately, that the poor are the victims of crime and the victims of unbridled immigration and social dislocation and his opposition will be ardently authoritarian. May will have to cut police

The coalition’s immigration cap is, as several Conservative Cabinet ministers have pointed out privately, flawed. It threatens to cap the kind of immigration that bothers almost nobody, high skilled foreign workers coming to this country to do a specific job. As Ken Clarke has told colleagues, the problem is that Labour — albeit right at the end of their time in office — stopped non-EU low-skilled immigration. So all there was left to cap was high-skilled immigration.   But there is a potential solution that would enable the cap — a Conservative manifesto promise — to remain in place, but also deal with Vince Cable and businesses’ objections http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23879244-vince-cables-attack-on-immigration-cap-wins-city-backing.do. One

After stumbling in his crusade for a graduate contribution, Vince Cable seemed to go a bit quiet. But this morning he’s roared back into the newspapers with another attack on coalition policy. The target of his anger is, once again, the immigration cap – but he’s being far less equivocal about it this time around. The way in which the cap is being implemented this year, he tells the FT, is “very damaging to the UK economy.” To force the point home, he says he has a  “file full” of companies who are suffering because of it. And, for good measure, the word “damaging” gets deployed once or twice more.

For the foreseeable, Vince Cable is going to be a political barometer figure: journalists and other innocent bystanders will sift through everything he says to check the temperature of the LibCon coalition. In which case, they’ll find little to excite or worry them in his cool interview with the Newcastle Journal today. The Business Secretary says all the right things about staying his role for the full five years (“that’s my intention, yes”) and about the internal dealings of the coalition (“it works in a very business like way”), even if he does quash the idea of a full merger between the two parties. It’s all unsurprising, uncontroversial stuff. Indeed,

Why is Vince Cable kicking off about immigration? Sure, to cause trouble – this is what he sees as his role. His ego can’t quite fit in that department. But the pledge to have immigration in the “tens of thousands” was not in the coalition agreement. At the time, David Cameron said this was an oversight and that it was still government policy. But as James said in his political column in the magazine, a great divide has emerged between policies in that bald coalition agreement and those mentioned verbally. The policies in the documents are now deemed sacrosanct, and things not in it – like the extraordinary pledge to

In 1690, Thomas ‘Diamond’ Pitt led an opulent delegation of the East India Company’s Madras factors, bearing their wares, to the Nawab of the Carnatic, the richest man in southern India, with the intention of buying him out. They succeeded, but Pitt had nothing on David Cameron’s delegation.  Six cabinet ministers, more than 10 CEOs and God knows how many diplomats are accompanying the Prime Minister. The only person missing is Nick – but that sort of thing is frowned upon by Delhi’s Edwardianly genteel political classes. As I wrote yesterday, pageantry titillates commercial diplomacy, and Cameron is staking everything on this mission. As the Independent reported yesterday, current Anglo-Indian bilateral trade is worth

David Selbourne is a political philosopher and theorist. This article appeared in the magazine last week; it is an edited version of his speech for a Spectator debate on the motion, ‘Too late to save Britain. It’s time to leave.’‘ Part of me feels that those who have helped to bring the country down — venal politicians, false educators, degraders of the media, thieving privatisers of the public domain — need to be fought to a standstill, here on this battlefield, by those with the energy, strength and clarity of mind to do so. For no one wants to believe that the country of his birth, language, upbringing and way

I was expecting drama when the Labour leadership circus called at Newsnight yesterday. Alas, the show whimpered and wheezed to a halt. A contest to determine the party’s future continues to gaze into the past. Assessing failure is essential to renewal, but the candidates are yet to offer anything substantively new.   Ed Balls and David Miliband shared one telling exchange. Balls has presented himself as the traditional candidate, and he would have you believe he speaks the language of Mrs Duffy. Gordon Brown’s hideous solecism in Rochdale revealed that he and his government were out of touch on issues such as housing and immigration. David Miliband is the centrist

Whoever wins Labour’s leadership, whether it’s a breed of Miliband or Balls, its future will be dominated by its understanding of how it found itself on opposition benches. Philip Gould, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the other progenitors of the New Labour project – were wrong. Their fatal assumption was that their core vote, the working classes, had no-where else to go. Labour, therefore, could reach out the middle classes, broadening their support and thus New Labour was born. At first their calculations were correct. Two slogans, “Education, Education, Education” and “Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime” brought together the two separate demographics to create a powerful

Meet Ed Balls, the candidate for Mrs Duffy. As the race for nominations closes, the Labour leadership candidates are beginning to focus on party members. With varying degrees of conviction, the contenders have identified immigration as the issue the party must address if it is to reconnect with those voters who spurned it. Ed Balls is that analysis’s most fervent advocate. He devoted an article in the Observer to the subject.  Balls argued that there has been too much migration from Eastern Europe, and it has caused economic and social ills in communities such as the one he represents. In hindsight, Britain should have accepted the transitional controls during the eastern bloc’s accession in 2004. Labour rejected