Immigration

Ed Balls’ choreographed apologies earlier today included the acknowledgment that “we should have adopted tougher controls on migration from Eastern Europe”. He first adopted this stance during last year’s leadership election, when he offered an undeliverable but popular objective to court the ‘Gillian Duffy tendency’, who had turned away from New Labour. What began as classic opposition politics is now the party line, with Ed Miliband telling delegates yesterday, “We got it wrong in a number of respects including understating the level of immigration from Poland, which had a big effect on people in Britain.

Yesterday, we introduced our new “Right to reply” series, where outside writers take on some of the ideas and arguments raised on Coffee House. In that case, it was the IPPR’s Matt Cavanagh replying to Fraser’s recent post on immigration and the labour market. Here’s another reply to the same post, this time by Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research: Myths abound when it comes to the effect of immigration on the labour market — and the most damaging of these is that most or all “new jobs” go to migrants. Although I agree with Fraser Nelson's general views on immigration, he is misleading on this one point.

George Osborne was right to boast in the Commons that Britain has the “second highest rate of net job creation in the G7”. Coffee House recently pointed out that all of the increase is accounted for by foreign-born workers. But what if you narrow the definition to foreign nationals? We put in an information request to the Office for National Statistics and the below information came back. It is quite striking. Over the 12-month period to which Osborne refers, 90.1 per cent of the extra employment amongst the working-age population can be accounted for by an increase in foreign nationals working in the UK. Here are the figures. The phenomenon of pensioners returning to work is fascinating, but separate.

Last week, George Osborne boasted that Britain has the second-fastest job creation in the G7. In tomorrow's Spectator, we disclose official figures showing that 154 per cent of the employment increase can be accounted for by foreign-born workers. We on Coffee House have often questioned Labour's record: 99.9 per cent of the rise in employment was accounted for by foreign-born workers. The graphs for the Labour years and the coalition year are below:     The idea of 154 per cent is strange, so I will reproduce the raw figures below:     Now, no one outside Westminster expects the UK labour market to change the day a new government is elected, but what matters is that the problem still exists.

Theresa May has banned an EDL march in Telford tomorrow, although the organisation will be allowed into the town to conduct a static demonstration. May has been a hive of hyperactivity since she returned from holiday, and this is yet another example of the government making a decisive gesture to amend for its perceived earlier indifference. It also looks like a strategic decision to contain that other unspoken working class resentment: immigration, and the hint of racial tension that it inspires from time to time. David Cameron was at pains yesterday to insist that the riots were a cultural issue, not a racial issue. He’s right.

What an intriguing interview Yvette Cooper gave to Sky's Dermot Murnaghan show this morning — and not just because she was standing, ruffled and incongruous, in a field somewhere. I was live-tweeting proceedings here, and there was much to anticipate even before she appeared. On top of today's stories about housing benefit, social care and immigration, the shadow home secretary would also have to deal with the comments made by Lord Goldsmith during the show's newspaper review. "It's not clear what Ed Miliband stands for," said Goldsmith, to cheers from the Tory press team. "I don't think the rifts in the party have been healed.