Politicians refuse to tell the truth to voters, when they say that immigration is the cause of persistently high worklessness, writes Declan Gaffney.
‘British jobs for British workers’ was one of the most idiotic slogans ever voiced by a Labour leader, combining economic illiteracy with staggeringly inept political opportunism. With that simple phrase Gordon Brown mobilised a misleading association between two of the most poisonous issues in UK politics – migration and benefit receipt – which blew up in his face.
It also handed the Conservatives the basis for a narrative on employment under Labour which has gained widespread acceptance despite being demonstrably false: all the growth in jobs went to migrants leaving out-of-work benefit receipt unchanged.
Back in 2009 the then leader of the opposition David Cameron quite rightly said:
“The Prime Minister should never have used that slogan. On the one hand he lectures everyone about globalisation and on the other he borrows this slogan from the BNP. He has been taking people for fools and has been found out.”
But if the Conservatives have avoided the slogan, they have never ceased to deploy the flawed reasoning behind it to trash Labour’s record. With Iain Duncan Smith’s speech in Madrid yesterday, ‘British jobs for British workers’ is back on the agenda.
The precedent was not lost on the editorial writer for that morning’s Daily Mail:
“Of all the broken Labour promises, few have turned out to be more hollow than Gordon Brown’s commitment to provide ‘British jobs for British workers’. Migrants allowed unfettered access to the labour market grabbed the lion’s share of new jobs while our unemployed, many of them school-leavers, were consigned to a life of welfare dependency.”
The Express was similarly supportive:
“For so long as Britain’s labour market is open to all-comers from dozens of other countries, the chances of getting our own long-term unemployed into work will be greatly impaired.”
There is little point in arguing with statements like this, which are related to labour market economics in much the same way as astrology is related to astronomy.
The table below shows what happened to employment and benefit receipt under the last government.
Prior to the financial markets crisis, employment grew by three million and out-of-work benefit receipt fell by over a million. With the ensuing recession employment fell and out-of-work benefit receipt rose. These are not the same thing: it is perfectly possible for employment and benefit receipt to rise at the same time, and the fact that the movements in both are of similar scale in the table below is a coincidence.
To claim that migration prevented welfare receipt from falling is to offer an incoherent explanation for something that didn’t happen.
Table 1:
Migration can affect benefit receipt, but not in the direct manner assumed in the musings of armchair labour market experts. Under certain circumstances, migration can affect wages and this can have knock-on effects on employment: you can read the theory here.
But studies of the impact of migration in the UK have found no or very slight negative impacts on wages for ‘native-born’ workers. So if there are any impacts from migration through lower wages to lower employment and thus higher benefit receipt, they are insignificant compared to the other factors which drive worklessness.
But this sort of detail is beside the point. The welfare/migration myth doesn’t involve even rudimentary economic theory. To borrow David Cameron’s words, it takes people for fools. We will have to see whether his minister will be ‘found out’. It seems unlikely, as the opposition, whose job this would be, have saddled themselves with their own version of the same myth.
The enduring mystery about ‘British jobs for Britsh workers’ is how and why Labour came to believe that it could dip into this know-nothing political territory without causing lasting damage to its reputation on employment and welfare.
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28 Responses to “When will politicians stop taking the public for fools on immigration?”
Dave Citizen
Declan – your analysis is too narrow to be of use in deciding what approach a society should take on migration. The impacts of imigration go much wider than can be shown by a handful of economic measures.
Taking a few obvious areas that get missed by such a narrow ‘economics’ analysis:
Immigration pushes up demand for limited housing in specific locations putting the existing community under increased housing price and access pressure.
Immigrants compete in ‘skills pockets’, impacting heavily in particular trades / places – e.g. building sites with say a polish ‘crew’. This may reinforce localised benefits dependency for those whose skills cover the same ‘pockets’.
Communities hosting pockets of migrants bear a disproportionate load in terms of language / cultural impacts in schools and elsewhere. Host children being affected may not reap the business benefits but may lose out in terms of educational quality and opportunity, further reinforcing the benefits dependency cycle.
Meanwhile the main business beneficiaries of mass immigration are nicely insulated, being part of an almost entirely separate culture and community, with reassuringly unaffordable houses and their own private schooling system.
So, any sensible society will want to carefully control immigration so that boosting the economy isn’t at the expense of a poorer standard of living for most of the people.
Ed's Talking Balls
‘Declan – your analysis is too narrow to be of use in deciding what approach a society should take on migration. The impacts of imigration go much wider than can be shown by a handful of economic measures.’
Very, very well said Dave.
That the political class thinks that immigration is simply an economic issue and that those with concerns can be silenced by pointing at graphs is indicative of its gross complacency. For years there have, justifiably, been accusations that politicians are out of touch. Nowhere is this more apparent than with immigration.
Michael Burke
Excellent piece.
Dave C, the analysis isn’t too narrow a all- it takes on the central myth that immigration has caused the rise in unemployment. That myth- and your account- ignore entirely the small matter that immigrants come to work and thus create prosperity. A far greater proportion of immigrants are of working age than the British-born population. As a result this reduces the dependency ratio- the proportion of the population either too old or too young for work. It increases the proportion at work and paying taxes.
Those who would seek to significantly curtail immigration are pursung the Japanese model, where immigration is severely restricted. Japan experiences shortages of labour in key areas, has a sharply rising dependency ratio and as a result has has two ‘lost decades’ of economic stagnation.
Declan
I wasn’t trying to set out what approach a society should take on migration, just to deal with a specific and demonstrably incorrect claim about migration and benefit receipt under the last government. As it happens, I agree that the value of purely economic perspectives is limited, but it is not zero: it helps us distinguish fact and fiction in some of the assertions which are made about the impact of migration, and it gives us a sense of the scale of impacts. As migration risks getting blamed for so many negatives in society, it is important to be able to quantify its effects. It is obvious for example that if migration had any effect at all on benefit receipt it was trivial compared to other factors- so IDS is ‘taking the public for fools’. With regard to the ‘cycle of benefit dependency’, that doesn’t stand up well to quantitative analysis either, but that’s for another day……
Laurence Hopkins
@RichardExell: RT @leftfootfwd: When will politicians stop taking the public for fools on immigration? http://t.co/1cOmCF6 @ACJSissons