The one hundred and sixty-fourth weekly "No shit, Sherlock" award

This week's award is presented to Migration Watch for the title of its latest report - 'Benefits Regime Makes UK Attractive Destination for East European Migrants'

"No shit Sherlock"


The press release is here and the whole research paper is here. I await the BBC's coverage of this report.......

Labour's lies on immigration

During the election campaign the Labour mantra was that immigration was now under control thanks to the introduction of their points system. This line was used to close down the debate and to avoid having to explain why immigration levels had risen so much over the first 12 years of this Labour government. The election has now been and gone and we read in The Mail that (my emphasis):

'Labour's supposedly tough points-based immigration system actually led to huge increases in foreign workers and students cleared to live in Britain, it emerged last night.

...

... analysis published last night showed that, in fact, it increased by 20 per cent - while the number of foreign students went up by more than 30 per cent.

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Figures released by the Office for National Statistics last week showed net immigration had increased the total population by 142,000 last year.

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Migrationwatch said Labour ministers had been asked parliamentary questions on the effects of the points system but had not given answers ahead of the election.

However, analysis of fresh government figures shows that the number of non-EU migrants given work permits, or permission to carry on working in Britain, increased by 20 per cent, from 159,535 in 2007 - the year before points were introduced - to 190,640 last year. The total includes dependents.

For students, which came under the points system a year later in 2008, the number of approvals increased by 31 per cent from 208,800 that year to 273,445 a year later.


...

In 2008, Phil Woolas said that 'had we introduced the points-based system a year ago there would be 12 per cent less migratory workers in the country than there are now'.

During the election campaign, Gordon Brown said: 'I think we have got to show people that we are taking tough action and the points-based system we have introduced is changing things. I hope that voters understand that we have got a very tough attitude on this.'

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics last week showed that more than half the 503,000 immigrants who arrived in the year to last September - 270,000 people - were from outside the EU.

At the same time, the number of foreign nationals given British citizenship rose above 200,000 in 2009 - up more than 50 per cent in 12 months.

The ONS also published projections showing the national population will hit 70million in 2029.'

So did Gordon Brown and Phil Woolas deliberately mislead the British public before & during the general election campaign over immigration control? Is it true that Labour deliberately increased immigration so as to 'rub the Right's nose in diversity' as Andrew Teather claimed and to increase their client vote as many others have claimed?

Unsurprisingly I can find no mention of these immigration figures on the BBC news website, indeed the latest news article that comes up on a search for 'immigration' on their website is this report that:

'Detainees at Dover's Immigration Removal Centre are being held for "unacceptably long" periods of time, according to a report.'

The BBC's political agenda becomes clearer by the day and the time for retribution must surely approach.

Gordon Brown takes responsibilty, without accepting he was responsible

John Humphrys actually tried to take Gordon Brown to task in his 08:10 interview, a lot of the interview was about Gordon Brown's culpability for the financial crisis in the UK and do listen as Gordon Brown says he takes responsibility without really accepting responsibility. Gordon Brown also refused to explain why the 60+ business leaders were deceived and still claimed that the 2.5 million new jobs are not primarily made up of immigrants - here Migration Watch explains the truth of that statement.

The BBC news bulletin immediately after the interview, of course, summarised the interview from a very positive angle of what Gordon Brown claimed.


As an aside who would you trust on economic matters: Gordon Brown who is sees a 0.4% rise in GDP as a positive sign that we are coming out of recession or Sir Stuart Rose who managed his company to a 5.1% rise in sales in the last quarter.

“correct that the Government has both economic and social objectives for migration policy”

Last October I wrote about the revelations of Andrew Teather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett. He claimed that he had proof that Labour's relaxation of immigration controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".

A key passage was that:

"He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.

He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.

He wrote: "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

"I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.""

At the time the claims of Andrew Teather received less attention than they deserved, the BBC in particular chose to all but ignore them.


Later in October I recorded how Phil Woolas chose to respond to a question posed by Chris Grayling - "I do not know to whom or to which reports the hon. Gentleman refers."


Today the story moves on to another level as The Telegraph reports that following a Freedom Of Information request by MigrationWatch:

"a previously unseen document suggested that Labour’s migration policy over the past decade had been aimed not just at meeting the country’s economic needs, but also the Government’s “social objectives”.

The paper said migration would “enhance economic growth” and made clear that trying to halt or reverse it could be “economically damaging”. But it also stated that immigration had general “benefits” and that a new policy framework was needed to “maximise” the contribution of migration to the Government’s wider social aims. "

This story needs to be investigated further and the Labour government pursued over it but I fear that David Cameron still thinks that he can become Prime Minister by being nice and not aggressive. Maybe he will change his mind, today's PMQs would be a good place to start, but I don't think he has the stomach for a proper fight with Gordon Brown and his team.

Meanwhile the BBC have once again chosen to ignore the story on their news pages but do have a magazine type piece entitled "Did immigration transform Britain by accident? " that claims precisely the opposite of what has been revealed recently. David Goodhart claims that

"At no point in the last 12 years does there seem to have been a general discussion in cabinet about the country's immigration strategy.

I have discovered that the final decision to open Britain's labour market to Eastern and Central Europeans was taken by a small group of officials and special advisers before an EU Council of Ministers meeting in Brussels.

It is emblematic of the insouciant way in which the great demographic transformation has occurred.

An accumulation of small decisions, all of them perfectly rational and sensible in their own right, has led to a mighty big - and pretty unpopular - outcome. "

David Goodhart also lists the five main reasons that immigration increased:

"What is more, between 1997 and 2003 there were, I think, five significant government decisions.

First, there was the abolition of the primary purpose rule, very unpopular with South Asians in particular, the repeal of which did have the effect of significantly raising the inward flow of spouses.

Second, there was the introduction of the Human Rights Act, which among many other things made it harder to restrict the number of asylum seekers.

Third, there was a liberalisation of student visas which more than doubled to over 130,000 a year. The government has just announced plans to restrict abuse of the system.

Fourth, there was a similar liberalization of work permits.

Fifth, opening the British labour market to people from the new EU states, seven years before any other big EU member. Instead of a few tens of thousands, more than 1 million people came after 2004. "

Oddly I do not recall the BBC reminding people that "there was a liberalisation of student visas which more than doubled to over 130,000 a year" when they reported the Labour government's plans to restrict abuse of this system just last week.


The massive increase in immigration into the UK over the last 13 years is nothing short of scandalous but, if true, the revelations that it was a deliberate policy of the Labour government may take us towards prosecuting leading government ministers for criminal activity.

"mass immigration under Labour was not just a cock up but also a conspiracy"

This is one of the most incredible and maybe political landscape changing stories I have reported since I started this blog.

The Telegraph report that:

"The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".

As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.

Critics said the revelations showed a "conspiracy" within Government to impose mass immigration for "cynical" political reasons.

Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s."

If true and I have heard no Labour minister deny it, then this is political dynamite. It blows a hole in the side of this Labour government and destroys what is left of their fingerhold on credibility. Mr Neather was a man who worked at the heart of this Labour government and who saw the raw material that he helped turn into speeches; he knows what facts were deliberately excluded and why.

The Telegraph article continues with this damning passage, again about Mr Teather:

"He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.

He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.

He wrote: "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

"I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."

The "deliberate policy", from late 2000 until "at least February last year", when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.

Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since then, according to Whitehall estimates quietly slipped out last month."

I wonder if Barabara Roche is available for comment.


Mr Teather is keen to point out that:

"(he) defended the policy, saying mass immigration has "enriched" Britain, and made London a more attractive and cosmopolitan place.

But he acknowledged that "nervous" ministers made no mention of the policy at the time for fear of alienating Labour voters.

"Part by accident, part by design, the Government had created its longed-for immigration boom.

"But ministers wouldn't talk about it. In part they probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn't necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men's clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland."

This, if true, is going to play out very badly for the Labour party in its heartlands and should see a further erosion in their support to the BNP. (see end of this post for a cynics response)

The report ends with comments from various concerned individuals: first Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch who has been calling for the truth to be told on immigration for a long time and suffered being tagged as a racist when it was verbotten to even discuss the subject, second Frank Field and Nicholas Soames whose recent report I mentioned yesterday and finally from a Home Office spokesman who ignores the central point of Mr Teather's claims:

"Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the Migrationwatch think tank, said: "Now at least the truth is out, and it's dynamite.

"Many have long suspected that mass immigration under Labour was not just a cock up but also a conspiracy. They were right.

"This Government has admitted three million immigrants for cynical political reasons concealed by dodgy economic camouflage."

The chairmen of the cross-party Group for Balanced Migration, MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames, said: "We welcome this statement by an ex-adviser, which the whole country knows to be true.

"It is the first beam of truth that has officially been shone on the immigration issue in Britain."

A Home Office spokesman said: “Our new flexible points based system gives us greater control on those coming to work or study from outside Europe, ensuring that only those that Britain need can come.

“Britain's borders are stronger than ever before and we are rolling out ID cards to foreign nationals, we have introduced civil penalties for those employing illegal workers and from the end of next year our electronic border system will monitor 95 per cent of journeys in and out of the UK.

“The British people can be confident that immigration is under control.”"

There is a not a whiff of this story on the BBC who prefer to report under the headline "BNP support in poll sparks anger" that:

"Peter Hain says his fears have been proved right after a poll suggested support for the BNP has risen after Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time.

A YouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph suggests 22% of people questioned would "seriously consider" voting BNP. "

A cynics response - Might it be that the appearance of this article within 36 hours of Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time is not a coincidence? Might the Labour government be playing their final card; the card of deliberately boosting the BNP vote in an attempt to move votes from Conservative as well as Labour voters in any future general election.

Moving from cynicism to conspiracy theory; might the Labour party be engaging in the most dangerous pastime of engineering social conflict, social conflict that then requires the hand (or taser) of firm government to suppress? Suppression here might include one or more of the following: brute force on the streets, suspension of democracy & the normal rule of law under the Civil Contingencies Act and maybe the use of EU law and order & army to "restore order". Could Labour be that desperate?

Labour's two million new jobs explained

As recently as Labour's 2009 Party Conference our duplicitous Prime Minister was claiming that "2 million more men and women providing for their families than in 1997." Today we are reminded once again that any statement by Gordon Brown needs to be checked and re-checked so as to remove the spin and misdirection.

Migration Watch report that: "The number of immigrants in the UK has increased by more than two million in the last eight years".

Now before you lefty types disbelieve that statistic because it comes from an organisation that you consider "obsessed" by race, do bear in mind that Migration Watch are simply reporting the figures in a report, by Oxford Economics, which was quietly slipped out on the website of the Department for Communities and Local Government last month with no attention drawn to it.

Soft touch UK

The lies that this Labour government has told us about the benefits of immigration are coming home to roost. The Mail reports that:

"Polish workers losing their UK jobs in the economic downturn are choosing not to return home but to stay and take advantage of the generous benefits system.

Immigrants from eastern Europe who have worked in Britain for 12 months or more can claim the full range of UK state benefits, including child and housing benefit and jobseekers' allowance.

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This is because benefit handouts in Poland are a fraction of those available in the UK. Child benefit for a first child in Britain is £20 a week, compared with around £3 per week in Poland.

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But Jan Mokrzycki, of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, said many Polish families aim to stay as long as possible to secure benefits because they are EU citizens.

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'Once they are set up they are qualified for benefits and support and as EU citizens they will receive it. So when they're getting that and are financially secure there's no reason for them to go home.'

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Migrationwatch chairman Sir Andrew Green said: 'The Government keeps telling us that eastern Europeans are not a burden on the welfare state. But these reports suggest some families could quite soon become a significant cost to the taxpayer.'"

This Labour government has conspired with big business to increase profits by paying less to immigrants than indigenous labour would demand. Why worry about the British people living on benefits as they will vote Labour anyway along with those in public sector jobs, the biggest increase in employment has been in public sector jobs.

Immigration figures

I have rarely commented upon immigration because I really cannot be bothered with having to moderate all the comments calling me a racist that I would no doubt receive. However the debacle around the counting of immigrants has left me fuming. This government releases a figure of 800,000 for the number of foreign workers entering the UK over the past decade; within two days they have had to revise the figure up, first to 1.1 million and then to 1.5 million. Even the latter figure is only an estimate, in fact it has to be only estimate because this Labour Government stopped the procedure of counting immigrants back in 1997. Now it is all done by interview surveys; as Matthew d'Ancona
writes in the Telegraph reports "privately, very senior ministers say that the sample used to arrive at these estimates is so small as to be worthless". Now isn't that reassuring? Our Government doesn't know how many people have entered the country in the last 10 years. However they can state with great certainty that "immigration is good for the country", that "immigration increases economic growth", that "we need foreigners to do the jobs that British people are unwilling to do", that "Britain needs migrant workers to help pay for our pensions" and that "Migrants contribute a net £2.5 billion to the exchequer". Harriet Harman was spouting the same claims again on The Politics Show this morning as well as attacking the Conservative party as the "nasty party" and as racist. How do they know this, other than as an article of faith, if they do not know how many immigrants into the UK there have been? The 800,000, 1,1000,000, 1,5000,000 figure came under more scrutiny yesterday when the Telegraph reported a discrepancy of around 500,000 between the number of people granted work permits with the number of people issued with National Insurance numbers.


You might want to read this article from Migration News in 1998 and see what you think of the promises and predictions within it.

You might want to contrast the above with this article entitled "Free Movement: A Case Against Immigration Controls" that is on the "Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment" web site. This organisation describes itself thus "We are a multi-racial alliance of feminist community organizers, scholarly activists and health practitioners committed to promoting the social and economic empowerment of women in a context of global peace and justice; and eliminating poverty."

Another article you may wish to peruse is this from "Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls" by Teresa Hayter. I reproduce two extracts here to give you a flavour of the belief set of some people. First this, "New migrants must have not only the right to work, but the right to join trade unions, to employment protection, to go on strike and to vote, and they must have full access to all the benefits enjoyed by other citizens, including health care, education, unemployment benefits and social security. They must not be threatened with deportation if they attempt to assert their rights."
Second this, "Finally, it remains true that whatever the economic rationale for securing a cheap and compliant workforce through 'managed immigration', ultimately immigration controls are explicable only by racism. If governments merely wanted a compliant workforce they could allow employers to make free use of the vast reservoir of labour which now exists in the world because of centuries of imperialist theft, as many employers in the United states and elsewhere urge. It is perhaps conceivable that immigration controls could disappear under capitalism. Many disagree, believing that free movement of people will only become a political possibility once the capitalist expropriation of the wealth of the Third World, and the wars to enable this, end. But while the abolition of immigration controls may require a revolution, what is clear is that, as we said in our manifesto No One Is Illegal, to render them fair would require a miracle. There can be no such thing as fair or non-racist immigration controls. Immigration controls have their origins in racism, and they legitimate and breed racism. They are inherently discriminatory, since they exclude foreigners or outsiders. They need to be opposed in their totality."

I have read many times in various places the theory that the relaxation of immigration controls and the relaxed attitude to immigration increasing over the last 10 years is due to a feeling among our rulers and liberal intelligentsia that we should redistribute wealth to the poor in other countries by opening our borders to let some of them in to this country. I used to doubt the validity of such a theory; having read the above, maybe I should lend it more credence.


Further up this article I listed some of the statemnets that Ministers and others use to justify the levels of immigration into this country. If you would like to read the responses that the BBC and Channel 4 do not raise with the makers of such statements, then I recommend a trip to Migration Watch's FAQ page. Migration Watch is an organisation that was attacked for being racist and for scaremongering back in the first few years of this decade. Then they obtained under freedom of information rules the following email from one Home Office official to another sent on 29 July 2003: ”I have made this point many times before but can we please stop saying that MW migration forecasts are wrong. I have pointed out before that MW assumptions are often below the government actuary’s department’s high migration scenario.”

And here is a quote from an editorial in The Times of 23 August 2004:
”Once an electorate loses faith in the reliability of evidence on which decisions are made, no amount of persuasion can restore faith in the system. This would be the real damage of any Home Office version of the Office for National Statistics. And this is why Migrationwatch is right to raise the alarm.”


Don't forget that it was this Labour Government that confidently predicted that the number of workers who would come to this country from Eastern Europe to work would be 13,000. The actual number that have come since April 2004 is in fact 1,000,000.


Having read Migration Watch's rebuttals to the oft raised arguments in favour of immigration, what do you think now?