David Cameron: Non-workers are key to immigration challenge

Few Tories question David Cameron's much-needed attempts to put environmentalism and social justice at the heart of the Tory mission.  Much more questionable has been his decision to stop talking about some of the issues most associated with the Tories in recent years.  46% of Tory members recently surveyed by ConservativeHome agreed that "David Cameron’s decision to downplay issues like tax, crime, Europe and immigration is demotivating some of the Conservative Party’s traditional voters and he needs to change quite soon."  His timing has certainly been unfortunate:

• The decision to stop talking about lower taxation*, for example, coincided with Britain's economy-hurting tax burden rising past that of Germany;
• The unwillingness to talk about Europe just as - today - an ICM/ Open Europe survey of 1,000 CEOs "found that a majority wanted Britain to renegotiate its membership of the European Union and regain powers from Brussels" (Reuters);
• And the downplaying of immigration policy although it has become the issue dominating the front pages of newspapers.

Today, however, the Tory leader is set to begin to address the immigration issue during a visit to Scotland.  According to The Scotsman, Mr Cameron will tell Disability Scotland that our society's failure to bring many sick and disabled people into society has caused the hunger for overseas workers:

"[There are] five million people, many of them disabled, who could work but are not working. As we write off our fellow citizens from participating in the workforce, other countries' citizens come to take their place... The gaps in the labour market are, very naturally, being filled by migrant workers... Our response to the numbers of disabled people who are not working is straightforward. For the sake of the people who are locked into welfare, for the sake of taxpayers, and for the sake of our economy, we have to bring them back into the mainstream - into work."

Related link: John Hayes MP sets out options to address Britain's skills crisis

* It appears that Cameron-loyalist Bruce Anderson has sympathy with this position.  In today 's Independent he writes: "While sticking to the line he has taken on fiscal responsibility, [Cameron] must do more to offer the hope of tax cuts. Above all, he should tell the voters what they all know already: that this government is wasting a great deal of their money, because it never took any interest in obtaining value for money. There is nothing wrong with spending a lot on health and education, as long as the result is world-class services, not world-class waste."

Comments

[Denis Cooper]

It's true that there are still members of the established population who are not working for money, for one reason or another - including good reasons, eg that their chosen work is to look after their families on an unpaid basis.

But if capital continued to flow in then eventually the local supply of labour would be exhausted even if all such people could be brought into employment, and once again we would have to face the question of whether we really needed or wanted to draw on the effectively infinite reserve labour force available around the world.

Of course we don't want the high levels of unemployment which we had ten to fifteen years ago, and it's very welcome that international investors have been prepared to put in their capital and generate jobs - at least in some parts of the country. But as far as I'm concerned it's not welcome that having taken the slack out of the local labour market they then persuaded the government to allow and encourage the large scale importation of foreign labour.

In effect it could go on forever - more capital comes in, which needs more labour to be brought in, and so on ad infinitum, or at least until the country is reduced to such a chaotic and lawless state that it's no longer an attractive place to invest - whereupon our friendly international capitalists will go and invest somewhere else, and leave us to deal with the mess which has been created.

This is our country, our shared national homeland. It's not just a piece of land which can be run as a business park for the benefit of international investors.

[TomTom]

You might just as well say the 200.000 aborted each year would mean we could make our own populationn without imports.

The issue is that many of these immigrant populations service their own communities - a trade in Balti chefs helps many restaurateurs financially as they process the visa applications for grateful relatives who leave their employ after 6 months in Britain. Or the CTN routine of making them self-employed shop-owners for the interim.

The immigration wave has NOTHING to do with job vacancies - find out how many are hidden on "training" work permits simply to avoid classing them as immigrants.

The politicians are lying to us all, and then they create ethnic-vacancies in the public sector to foster their voting clientele. Import enough people from the Congo and you create vacancies for translators, social workers, teaching assistants............it is amazing how jobs can be created...........and with the taxpayer being so bountiful, they can be funded.

Why not cut the BS and tell it like it is, the politicians have stiffed the public and are looking for a sugar coating to feed them strychnine

[Jon Gale]

Too right Denis Cooper! Totally agree.

Cameron's reticence to adress immigration/multiculturalism is very worrying indeed.

A case for the "and theory" I think : NHS and Immigration.

Also, If DC wants to increase the number of people in work, he could perhaps raise the minimum wage in combination with lowering (or capping) benefits, thus making going to work 'worth it' for the lowest paid.

[Matthew Sinclair]

I think that the problem with Cameron's position is that his solution is statistically limited. While we can and certainly should improve workforce participation and watch concealed unemployment we have one of the highest rates of labour force participation in the EU. As such, I don't think this can be a major strand in our immigration policy; welfare reform is important but it won't end or significantly reduce immigration.

A better question would be which kinds of immigration cause us the biggest problems these days?

I think the political outcry over immigrants taking jobs has died down quite a lot over the last couple of years. It is being replaced by genuine fears over the failure to integrate certain communities. A Conservative response could be to emphasise intra-EU migration, perhaps by taking a stance against restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians but take a very hard line on other migration. That sounds like a fine AND theory Conservative response to me.

[Jack Stone]

Of course we need to control our borders in a more sensible and fair way then we do at present but I can understand David Cameron`s reluctance to talk about immigration when everytime the subject is brought up we get immigration mistaken for race and this insulting nonsense that brands immigrants as lawless by saying that high immigration means crime.
Personally I respect the Eastern Europeans who have come over here since there countries have join the EU. They have came here for two reasons. To work and provide for ther families which I think is admirable.
I am afraid at the moment the party should stand back and say nothing about immigration as I think much of the debate as little to do with immigration and a lot to do with race and I think that is something we should not be discussing.

[TomTom]

The only person that connects RACE with Immigration is Jack Stone - often and repeatedly. It is probably the fault of his teachers who programmed him with that form of claptrap.

The simple fact is that land is finite and to turn more green fields into concrete and housing and drain the water table even lower by having ever more housing for Britain's expanding population - 61.5 million and growing. Bradford alone will expand 25% in the next 20 years and the need for land will push us to emulate Adolf Hitler and seek Lebensraum

Maybe we should invade France as our population is bigger and they have much more land.

Or create favellas around London.......certainly the notion of individual homes cannot be sustained in the Southeast and it may be that only apartments should be built as population increases - housing is now prohibitively expensive.

Don't know about you Jack Stone, but I reckon a black Ghanian occupies the same amount of space in housing as someone with ruddy cheeks like yourself, I bet you put the same waste down the sewers, and draw about the same in water from the mains.

I know that if people buy plasma TV sets at the current rate we will need another 2.5 nuclear power stations to be built, but if London does hit 9 million people let us calculate how many power stations will be needed, hospitals, doctors, Tube trains, cars, buses, schools.............did you hear today on World At One - that 75% London's population is White but only 35% schoolchildren.

Now let us assume those 65% do not in the main speak English but a variety of other languages - how low must the pupil-teacher ratio be ? I had one teacher to 38 children, but I bet with 5-10 different languages we will need a lot more teachers, a lot more classrooms and a lot more money.

So let's have no more of your Sanders of the River stuff Jack Stone, stop your colour prejudice and work out that infrastructure is colour blind........you cannot fob off poles or Ghanians with inferior public services so stop trying to link Immigration with Race like some latterday Enoch Powell

[Matthew Sinclair]

Love the random accusations of racism. Can't go wrong.

I'd suggest that perhaps immigration's strain on infrastructure might be cancelled out by low fertility rates in the UK. Too many people is unlikely to wind up being the issue.

By contrast, there are important issues of integration which involve ethnicity and discussing them does not make one a racist.

However, Jack's argument wasn't even about this. He argued that it was hard to separate immigration from questions of race so Cameron should avoid the subject where possible.

[Denis Cooper]

Matthew Sinclair @ 14:16 - "I think the political outcry over immigrants taking jobs has died down quite a lot over the last couple of years. It is being replaced by genuine fears over the failure to integrate certain communities. A Conservative response could be to emphasise intra-EU migration ..."

Not really, the outcry about British workers being displaced or forced to work for lower wages has only been building up over the last couple of years, and that will get worse. The fears about integration have been there much longer, and that will also get worse.

The basic hypothesis accepted by this government is that we need immigration.

There are various justifications put forward for that from time to time, but it boils down to an effective declaration that this is a "country of immigration".

About eight years ago I wrote to my MP urging that the Tory party should declare that in its view this country should not be regarded as a "country of immigration", but she disagreed. During those years government ministers, and according to this letter in the Times on Saturday the BBC World Service, have been actively encouraging mass immigration without any significant challenge from the opposition:

"Sir, At the end of his Chatham House lecture (report, Oct 11), Gordon Brown announced that he had designated £15 million a year for a new television channel for Iran in the BBC World Service.

The World Service, where I worked for a dozen years until 1980, has for some time been a significant factor in making Britain a magnet of immigration from the Third World. With a new Arabic channel that will start broadcasting next year, the new Farsi section will further strengthen the pull of London as the main gathering place of Islamic theorists of one kind or another.

It is beyond understanding why one government department, the Foreign Office, should spend £245 million of taxpayers’ money on the World Service to undermine the work of another, the Home Office, which is trying to reduce immigration. As it stands now, the World Service gives the false impression to the world that Britain cannot wait to welcome millions more young men from beyond Europe."

[Denis Cooper]

"England faces population boom"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/13/npop13.xml

"England's population will rise by more than six million within 25 years, official figures predicted yesterday."

"By 2029, the Office for National Statistics predicts there will be 56.4 million people in England, confirming it as one of the world's most crowded nations."

"The biggest factor in the population rise is immigration. It has been estimated that 80 per cent of the rise will be as a result of migrants."

[Julian Williams]

"There is nothing wrong with spending a lot on health and education, as long as the result is world-class services, not world-class waste."

Well that depends where the money came from. The NHS budget has gone up from 40 billion to a projected 110 bn by 2008. Some of this money (£150 billion since 1997) is coming from taxing private pensions, the extra staff employed by the NHS have guaranteed pensions which will need to be paid for in the future.

This is living today at the expense of tomorrow. Cameron's policy is the same as the Lib Dems; to go on increasing this spending on the NHS beyond that projected by Gordon Brown. He has laid out his stall as a tax and spend prime minister and will be a disaster for both the country and the Tory party

[Jack Stone]

Discusing immigration should be about discussing how we restrict the amount of people coming into the country which I agree as an island we have to do but I am afraid I don`t understand why that discussion is linked often on this site to crime and intergration.
I think people often link them because of there misguided and yes racist attitude to other races.
They resent people who have a differant religion or culture than there own and because of the criminal behaviour of a small number of immigrants they tarnish the majority with being law breakers.
Read what people actually write on this site and you will get what I am saying.
I believe David Cameron should talk about immigration and I expect him too as time goes on but I don`t think he should talk about race matters as race should be unimportant and irrelevant to us all.

[Julian Williams]

Jack Stone wrote "but I don`t think he should talk about race matters as race should be unimportant and irrelevant to us all."

Why? Are you saying different races do not have different cultural values? Are you saying indigenous communities (mixed, black or white) should have no interest in changes in the cultural mix of their communities? That is a very PC point of view, but is it really realistic?

Making statements that are bland, PC, self-righteous, thoughtless and indifferent to the feelings of others less fortunate than oneself gives one a wonderful feeling inside, but it should not be confused for virtue. True, engaging your brain will not bring you all the answers, but at least it will contribute to a debate which might develope into a consensus about a way foward through difficult probems.

[Matt Wright]

I think there are issues about how many people we can practically absorb and integrate onto our island whatever their race etc. Growth in population is creating a churning of residents with what approximate to ghettos in some urban areas and a rush to the suburbs and rural areas by some of the indigenous population. Together this is putting pressure on housing with for example smallish rural towns being required by the Govt to allocate large areas for new housing. Often this does not accomodate local need but really outside demand. In such areas there is undue pressure on services and the environment. I think we need a proper set of controls on those coming into Britain based on clearly defined criteria eg skills shortages,

Matt

[Stuart Raven]

Among Scots Tories there is one Anglo-Welshman whose name is revered

The late, great, Enoch Powell.

Need I say more?

[Denis Cooper]

I think the first issue is about how many immigrants we actually need and/or want, for what reasons, on what basis. For example there's a big difference between allowing a foreigner to work in this country for a few months or years, because he wants to and it suits us to permit that, and allowing him to come here, stay and then acquire citizenship. By giving him citizenship, we are giving him and his descendants a share in our country, and making a legal and solemn contract by which the British state accepts responsibility for their protection for all time in the future in exchange for their allegiance. That is not something to be taken lightly on either side. Just as there's a big difference between allowing a particular individual to come here because his life is in danger in his own country and we are prepared to give him a safe haven, at least temporarily, and casually allowing all and sundry to come here on the mistaken general assumption that "this country needs immigrants". And the rules governing all these decisions should be taken democratically, solely according to the will of the existing body of citizens, not at the behest of the EU or the UN or anybody else.

Interestingly there was a poll in the Sunday Times recently, and in one of the questions the respondents were asked how many immigrants we should take each year. The median response was strikingly low - about 10,000 a year. In other words, half of the respondents thought that 10,000 a year would be too many, while half thought it would be too low.

[UKfirst]

This immigration madness is destroying what is left of Britain as we know/knew it. The people most immediately affected are the poorest but all will suffer before long - the potential for EU immigration is vast, vast, vast. The UK is full and needs to lose population. If Cameron misses this one the Conservative Party will be finally condemned as useless.

[Stuart Raven]

If there's any need for specialised workers then allow them in as guest workers to go home when they're no longer required.

Otherwise we need to be reducing the UK population. It's no big problem here in Scotland (though the left would like to import immigrants) but I've worked in the SE of England and can see it's becoming a hell on earth.

Did Cameron really say he wanted to build on Green Belt? That is absolutely appalling.

[TomTom]

the potential for EU immigration is vast, vast, vast.

The only place in Europe where English lessons are free; undocumented working is easy, healthcare requires no subscriber card, and where public funds are there to facilitate settlement - is an island across the water from France