As usual with far-left responses to immigration, the question of culture is completely glossed over here. It’s funny how you can witter on so much for the Bickerstaff Record but not mention culture once!

Good politicians (e.g. Cruddas) understand the need for a common British culture and way of life in the UK. New Labour’s liberal, open-door immigration policy has eroded that in places, and it is right for the leadership contenders to prioritise getting it back.

I’m getting the idea that the expression ”dog whistle politics” is a convenient way of rounding up all comment that someone doesn’t like in this area, and tarring it all with the same brush.

And wasn’t the ban on England shirts in pubs during the world cup daft story a godsend?

Are you claiming that pressure on housing and some public services is unrelated to (the scale of) immigration? That there is not greater competition for jobs / pressure on (eg skilled trades) wages?

· Throughout its 13 years, New Labour backtracked on the issue of immigration and pandered to the anti-immigration sentiments.

Firstly, the debate was always about non-European immigration, as EU migration is an accepted to part of the EU treaties; as such there was always a race dimension. To counter that with an Australia-like points system was always going to be unconvincing. Even in Australia, the points system was concocted when the “White Australia Policy” had run its course and European migration had dried up in the fifties.

Secondly, economic and monetary globalisation was hailed as a way forward but the argument that movement of labour also had to be global was never made.The inequality created by globalisation pushed many people to move in order to make a living, something that was welcomed by employers and governments,sometimes grudgingly.

Thirdly, the only alternative to bottlenecks was to outsource work that could be outsourced to other countries with the resulting call-centres, office bureaus and IT departments in India, Malaysia and South Africa. Noticeably, no (British) Trades Union ever tried to defend the jobs, pay and conditions of this outsourced workers.

I’ve already turned my extended comment on your original post of this into a post of my own, so rather than cut and paste it:

http://theoldpolitics.blogspot.com/2010/05/big-scary-i-word.html

Immigration not a big problem in Bickerstaffe (population 2000) then, Paul?

Hmm….. thought not.

Not much of a downside in taking a principled stand then, is there?

Having said that, I agree with you.

I wondered how long it would take someone to commit a ‘ Lump of Labour Fallacy ‘ and cjcjc managed it just 3 posts in. Immigration does not drive down wages it raises them in aggregate. Immigration does not cause unemployment because with immigration the economy is larger.

It is little wonder that people have a negative view of immigration when the British print media print relentless drivel, myths and fallacies. The saddest aspect of the leaders debates is none of them had the decency or bottle to argue the positive case for immigration. Nick Clegg instead of facing up to Cameron and Brown and presenting a positive case was always on the back foot trying to be as illiberal as the other two.

“I wondered how long it would take someone to commit a ‘ Lump of Labour Fallacy ‘ and cjcjc managed it just 3 posts in. Immigration does not drive down wages it raises them in aggregate. Immigration does not cause unemployment because with immigration the economy is larger.”

Somewhat simplistic. While the relationship is not as simple as bar wisdom might suggest, to say there is no relationship requires one to believe that our access to natural resources and our export markets somehow grow larger with immigration, and that business will always respond to a growth in demand for goods and supply of labour by producing more and employing more, as opposed to, say, raising profit margins by putting up prices and cutting wages.

There is no ‘ bar wisdom ‘ in knowing that immigration does not cause unemployment. The technical term that economists use for such a belief is drivel.

Why would our export markets be affected by immigration? Export markets are positively correlated to the real effective exchange rate. If anything immigration would have a marginal positive effect on exports. Immigrants send remittances back to their country of origin, which in time are recycled back to the UK buying UK goods and services.

In competitive markets, producing more and employing more is exactly how business responds to increase in demand.

Did the last two decades of increased immigration see producers respond to increase in demand by raising prices? It would be all there in the CPI & RPI figures for that period. The period known as ‘ The Great Moderation ‘ because of subdued CPI.

Considering UK average wages are 2nd only to Denmark in the EU on 2007 figures it would be difficult to argue that immigration depressed wages in the UK. ( average wages based on full time employees in enterprises of 10 or more employees )

Immigration raises productivity and that in turn raises the real wage of everyone in the economy. There is no long-term way to raise living standards other than through productivity gains. If you check with the NSO data you will see that over the period of increased immigration the UK has had the fastest growth in productivity in the G7. It is this growth in productivity that allows increased wages.

Paul Cotterill

Good luck with your campaign, though personally I think you are pissing in the wind at this precise moment. The Labour Party has lost all credibility with its target audience. They have remained stubbornly silent and/unwilling to act on many of the issues that concern the people you are attempting to reach out to. I have no idea how active within the Labour movement, but if you are as active as your OP suggests then I wonder if you have heard the charge that the Labour Party only care about ‘ethnic minorities’*. I live in the Labour heartlands and I heard many people repeat these immigration myths. When I challenge them about the facts and figures (as an SNP supporter admittedly) people seemed not to particularity about the ‘facts’ they are more motivated my visceral feelings than anything else. I am not sure you can attack these deep seated prejudices with bar and pie charts. The ‘immigrants eat our swans’ type stories are ridiculous and pretty poisonous pieces of journalism, but we have to accept that right now these stories resonate with the public.

I am not suggesting that anti-immigrant and racism are trivial matters that can afford to be put on the back burner, far from it. Racism is something that we need to tackle head on when ever we encounter it. However, we (the Left in general) need to win back the trust of the people on issues that they actually worry about, before we can expect to win hearts and minds on what they should be worrying about. You have alluded to that in your draft letter, I see.

Prime example today. IDS has sent out a thinly veiled commitment to a forced labour regime. Pretty strong stuff, which strikes at the very heart of what we stand against, both in terms of ideology and in practical terms. Yet the Left in general and Labour in particular have been strangely silent. I have yet to read Labour’s (or the lefts) response to that, why?

*the term ‘ethnic minorities’ being a euphemism for whatever language we will have heard.

Richard W @ 9

Considering UK average wages are 2nd only to Denmark in the EU on 2007 figures it would be difficult to argue that immigration depressed wages in the UK. ( average wages based on full time employees in enterprises of 10 or more employees )

It may be true that ‘average’ wages are high by EU standards and that immigration has no effect on overall average wages’, but doesn’t that assume that immigration would have a uniform effect on wages.

If immigration means the cost of low skilled labour goes down, it surely does not follow that skilled labour falls as well, does it? Doesn’t that just mean that the owners of capital just get a bigger piece of the pie? Is it possible that two decades of immigration has meant that although the pie (in terms of average wages has stayed the same, that the various slices have changed in proportions?

The other issue being that I would imagine that many people have been displaced from the workforce over the years. Immigrants, almost by definition, tend to be from the most mobile, most resourceful and ambitious cohorts of their society. When they come here they are taking jobs at the lower end of the economic spectrum. These jobs are often filled by those on the ‘left hand of the bell curve’, i.e. those who have least alternative sources of employment.

Let’s not kid ourselves, here. Introducing half a million or so talented people into the labour force is going to have a detrimental effect on those who are least able to compete. Who in their right mind would employ a 52 year old angina sufferer when there are CVs from over a thousand of the fittest young Europeans willing to work in your factory? Giving the 52 year old a ‘fit note’ is not making him any more attractive to an employer, not when there is a surplus of labour running to millions.

I would like to make one thing clear. I am Scottish, and as many as you will know the Scottish Diaspora is huge. We Scots (and our descendants) are in every Country on the planet. We have even made it as far as London. We have sought out opportunities for hundreds of years and I personally have no problem with immigrants or immigration. I cannot fault anyone coming here for a better life. Under no circumstances should anything I say be considered an attack on immigrants. We have lax employment laws and have actively trying to push people out of stable employment for forty years.

7. Richard W. I suggest you study the rate of increase in salaries of unskilled , semiskilled and skilled construction workers of the 80s and 1995-2007 construction booms. Immigrant labour kept down the rate of increase of construction labour costs in the 1995 -2007, particularly for unskilled/semi skilled labour in the construction, agricultural and food processing industries.

Demand for chartered engineers/scientists in the high tech sector has increased because our education system does not produce enough.

Labour has done very little to develop the high paying-high skill jobs since 1945 because the party is dominated by unskilled/semi skilled unions, especially those in the public sector. If Labour want well paid jobs in the wealth producing sector then they better ensure the conditions are suitable for the formation and expansion. If people had highly paid jobs in the wealth producing sectors then they would not complain about immigrants taking poorer paid unskilled jobs.

I see that Paul Cotterill increased the Labour vote in Bickerstaffe by 600%! How’d you manage that, Paul? East European agricultural workers, perhaps…. or by Labour’s more usual method – postal vote fraud?

@ Jim & Charlie 2

The examples you cite are micro and I am referring to the benefits to the macro economy. I do not doubt some of the indigenous population lose out with increased immigration. However, the macro economy benefits and the people who lose out are also constituent parts of the macro economy. Should we conduct national policy based on that no one should be harmed from competition? Even though that policy was utility enhancing for a greater amount of people than those harmed? Technological innovations since the industrial revolution have proceeded along similar lines. Disruptive changes have come along and made whole industries, firms and skills obsolete. Those employed in the old industry lost out but the utility of society was improved.

@ your paragraph 2, Jim. That would be the case if the pie was just larger but more people shared it. However, if productivity increases then GDP does not just get bigger, GDP per capita also increases.

On your final paragraph I would agree. I have been part of the Scottish Diaspora at various times and an economic migrant. The Tartan Mafia yes it does exist helped me find employment in places working 14 hours a day where I probably could not have obtained it on my own. I was not there to see the sights but to make money so I was an economic migrant. Therefore, I have no objection to economic migrants coming to the UK.

@ Charlie 2, I do not disagree with your post and its point about skills. Do you have any evidence apart from anecdotal about wages in construction? Moreover, there is a big difference between nominal wages and real wages. Although nominal wages might not be rising fast in some sectors the real wage can be if CPI is subdued. Moreover, presumably it was construction workers building houses for the new immigrants. So although even if wages were flat there was increased employment opportunities.

‘ Immigrant labour kept down the rate of increase of construction labour costs in the 1995 -2007 ‘

I am not sure what to make of that statement. Are you suggesting that keeping down costs is not a good thing? If costs increase they are passed on to the client so even more people would be worse off. I know some people do not like to hear it but businesses do not exist to provide employment or high wages. They exist to make money and the employment and wages are a spin-off from the core purpose. I fully agree with you that we need to do much more in inspiring, financing and training our young in science, engineering and IT.

14. Richard W. Construction is cyclic. People need need to earn high wages in the boom to make it through the lean times. Historically, the good pay in construction was result of bonus payments. The rate of increase in pay in the recent boom did not match that of the 80s- supply an demand .

Immigration has benefitted employers and particularly the middle class who employ builders but not British construction workers, especially the the unskilled/semi skilled sectors such as labourers and plant operatives which are probably the majority of the workforce. The craftsmen, – electricians, plumbers, carpenters and bricklayers , in that order have not faired so badly.

Immigration has also kept down wages in the agricultural and food processing sectors which has increased rural poverty. Nowadays there is often little work for the rural unskilled and semi-skilled: it does not take many immigrants to keep wages down. The highly skilled bricklayer/stonemason working on large houses may not have been affected but the tractor driver / unskilled harvesting fruit and vegetables has.

Richard @ 14

Surely the economy is all at micro level, when it comes down to it? Perhaps immigration does benefit the macro economy but that is scant consolation to the people who lose out though. I, like most people, are not particularly interested in the macro economy, just my small part of it. Don’t misunderstand, I realise my fate is directly linked to the macro economy, but there is little point in the economy is growing at five percent a year, if my wages are going down year on year, is there? The ‘you are suffering for the greater good’ is not a popular line on the doorstep, is it? The point about who suffers for the greater good goes at the heart of political ideology, I suppose.

An influx of labour is undoubtedly beneficial to the owners of industry. We seem to be saying here that if a million people lose out in the job market and/or terms or conditions, just as long as a million plus benefit to a greater or lesser extent. Again, hardly a consolation to the person, who has lost his job thanks to immigration that his weekly shop has came down because of those same immigrants. If he has lost say 80 quid a week, it hardly a benefit o him that he see an extra 5 quid knocked off his shopping bills.

For me, the crux of the matter is, who benefits and who loses out via any National policy and less about the sheer weight of numbers. We never sell this the other way round, we cannot get the majority of the richest in society to take the odd modest hit so that the ‘greater good’ for people at the bottom get a boost. It seems that the weakest, poorest in our society are always expected to take the hits; and at that level of the labour market they are the biggest hits, so that the better off can prosper. It wouldn’t be so bad, if we could accept that we should compensate the people who are expected to make the biggest sacrifice, but we do not. We require that at any one time large swathes of the population don’t work and yet when they are pushed out the labour market, we demand that they be punished still further. Given that we need unemployment to keep the economy stable and have built in mechanisms to make ensure that unemployment is endemic, we then complain when these people are driven out the labour market.