MASS IMMIGRATION IS A DISASTER AND LABOUR IS TO BLAME

THROUGHOUT his time in office Gordon Brown has rightly become notorious for his dishonesty but, in his lengthening catalogue of deceit, no utterance has been more grossly misleading than his 2007 vow to promote “British jobs for British workers”.

His pose as the champion of the British people has always been an outrageous fraud. Now the full extent of Brown’s lie has been exposed by new official figures showing how badly home-grown employment has suffered from mass immigration. According to the Office of National Statistics, almost every single new vacancy in the economy since 1997 has effectively gone to a foreigner, with immigrants having filled an incredible 98.5 per cent of the 1.67million new jobs during the last 13 years of Labour rule.

Over the same period the number of British-born  workers employed in the private sector has actually fallen, down by over 700,000 from 18.4million in 1997 to 17.7million today.  So a jobs boom for migrants has meant bust for ordinary Britons. No other major  country in the Western world has allowed its economy to be so grotesquely distorted by a never-ending flood of new arrivals. What the Government has done is not create jobs but simply import workers from overseas on an epic scale. The Labour Party was founded at the beginning of the 20th century to represent the interests of the British working-class.

Behind its cynical slogans Brown’s Labour Party now actively operates against British  workers in favour of foreigners. The socialist obsession with mass immigration amounts to a cruel betrayal of the British people. It is a bitter irony, given Brown’s pretence of caring about the poor, that the only real gainers from this vast influx are the affluent, such as the trendy metropolitan elitists rejoicing in the low costs of Polish plumbers or ukrainian nannies. But there have been no genuine benefits for working- class Britons. Job security has worsened. Employment oppor- tunities have been restricted, wages driven down.

Labour persistently claims that mass immigration is the route to economic prosperity but the opposite is true. The annual rate of arrivals has been running at more than 500,000 in recent years, just at a time when Britain has endured the deepest recession since the Thirties. It is the economics of the madhouse to import millions of foreigners when more than five million Britons are without jobs and on benefits.

We could cut the welfare bill and boost taxation if we put our own people back to work and slashed immigration. More- over, the reliance on overseas labour makes a nonsense of the Government’s  remorseless expansion of higher education. Over 40 per cent of all young people now go to university yet employers complain more vociferously than ever about skill shortages, hence their eagerness to recruit migrants.

The wider consequences of mass immigration have been disastrous. With 5.4million foreigners having settled here since 1997 and probably another one million living  illegally Britain has become one of the most overcrowded places in the Western world. Public  services are at  breaking point in many areas. The annual  welfare bill has rocketed to almost £200billion, not least because, contrary to fashionable Left-wing mythology about “lazy” Britons, migrants are more likely to be benefits claimants. It is the infamous laxity of our social security system rather than the jobs market that has been one of the biggest attractions for foreigners.

Mass immigration has brought us violent crime and gang warfare, social dislocation and domestic terrorism. The state-enforced dogma of multi-cultural diversity has worsened divisions by emphasising what divides us rather than encouraging integration. We live in a fractured land where Sharia courts now operate informally and the burka is commonly worn on our streets. Our heritage is traduced or ignored.

When UK passports are dished out at the rate of 200,000 a year the once-proud concept of British citizenship has long since lost its meaning. But that is the way Labour wants it. The socialist Government, filled with loathing for our national identity, has used mass immigration as a battering ram to destroy the traditional structure of Britain. The economic arguments used by Labour  politicians to justify their policy of open borders were always just a smokescreen.

All the hollow claims about jobs and growth hid the feverish Left- wing determination to create “a new social order”, in the immortal words of Harriet Harman. One of Tony Blair’s aides, Andrew Neather, admitted that Labour’s enthusiasm for mass immigration was not based on economics but on the desire “to rub the right’s nose in diversity”.

To treat the British people in this way is a disgrace. The transformation of our society is one of the great scandals of the Labour years, as undemocratic as it is cynical. Fortunately at this election there is a realistic alternative to Labour’s cata- strophic strategy. The Tories have promised to introduce a strict annual limit on immigration, returning the influx to the levels of the Eighties.

In an almost laughable response, Gordon Brown has said that this Conservative pol- icy will cause “great damage to British businesses”. As this week’s immigration statistics show, the real damage has already been done by Labour.

Leo McKinstry

Footnote: Conservative would cap the annual limit on migrants from OUTSIDE the EU, which really won't make that much difference to the numbers. It's just another con to get you to vote for them.