Jonathan Djanogly MP: Immigration needs more than a quick-fix solution

Jonathan Djanogly is Member of Parliament for Huntingdon.  Follow Jonathan on Twitter.

Without fanfare or boast, some parts of the UK are doing rather well.  The East of England for instance is one of the few regions which is a net contributor to rather than taker from the national economy.  In my constituency of Huntingdon, with an unemployment rate of around two percent, frankly, to be without a job is generally either a temporary state of affairs or a lifestyle decision.

Given that the employment pool is so sparse, my constituency’s employers would most likely think I had lost my marbles if I advocated the return of their Polish and Latvian workers.  That is their efficient, willing and hardworking staff, who in some cases form over eighty percent of their workforce.  Likewise, further north into the fens, farmers are concerned that their Romanian and Bulgarian crop pickers will disappear once those countries’ workers are given general access to our job markets in 2014.  Of course the assumption is that their places will be filled by Ukrainians and other non accession nationals – it being given that British youth would rather pick up benefits than crops.  Clearly, the short term imperative of business to fill positions, is at variance with the long term need to increase opportunities for young British people.

Many are now speculating why Labour allowed immigration to rise to 591,000 a year by 2010.  Some believe that it was a political manoeuvre to bolster the cities’ suburbs with, what they hoped would be, Labour voting immigrants.  However, I personally go for the economic view that, at a time of rapid growth, Labour were providing the work-force that their own policies were failing to deliver in the UK - moreover, a work-force that was cheap.  It is interesting to note that this was the first time in the post-war period that growth did not go hand in hand with significant wage inflation for the low paid.  Of course it should not have required an abundance of foresight to realise that the short term economic benefits of ramping immigration were in effect a bandage covering some very serious structural failings in our society and our economy.

Jonathan Djanogly MP: It's time to shine a light into the murky world of union funding

Jonathan Djanogly, MP for Huntingdon and Shadow Solicitor General, on the need to tackle trade union barons.

The debate on how political parties are financed has reignited in recent months following the ‘cash for honours’ scandal, the admission of law-breaking by Labour Party through dodgy donations and ongoing irregularities over cash accepted during Labour’s internal elections.

Within months of becoming leader, David Cameron backed a comprehensive set of radical proposals to clean up the way that parties fund themselves. The fact that these bold ideas did not get greater coverage in the media was largely due to the fact that its launch was trumped by Labour’s Lord Levy and the cash for honours scandal. It was that scandal which forced Tony Blair into creating inter-party talks, chaired by Sir Hayden Phillips.

These talks broke down in October 2007 because Labour were unable or unwilling to countenance any meaningful reform of the trade unions’ control of Labour’s finances. In the Conservative Party’s view, there is no point in any reform which leaves the unions running the Labour Party by pulling their financial strings. Labour have sought to prevent the public from focusing on this by suggesting that the Conservative commitment to reform had weakened. This is nonsense.

As the unpublished minutes show, the talks were scuppered by the refusal of the Labour representatives, Peter Watt and Jack Straw, to discuss a cap on donations which would fully include the trade unions. (It is worth noting that Peter Watt showed a detailed and extensive knowledge of party funding law during the talks, which strangely has now left him).

Whilst those Talks have ended, a great deal of work was undertaken behind the scenes by Ministry of Justice civil servants seconded to Sir Hayden. For the first time since the 1980s, there was a thorough analysis of how trade unions bankroll the Labour Party - in return for policy favours and taxpayer funding from the Labour Government. It is no surprise that Ministers have again and again refused to make this evidence public.