Oops!
So, there we have it, at last, a final admission by no less than the Labour Minister responsible for immigration, Liam Byrne, that the large-scale volume of net immigration his party has deliberately engineered with such machismo these last ten years has ‘damaged the poorest communities and deeply unsettled the country’, to use the words employed by the Times yesterday in its account of what he has admitted.
The admission comes in a collection of essays published yesterday by the centre-left think-tank Policy Network entitled ‘Rethinking Immigration and Integration’.
For some time now, to those with eyes to see it has been manifest New Labour’s predilection for relying on importing cheap foreign labour to foster economic growth has come at a high price for the country’s least well-off citizens. Their job prospects and pay levels have been squeezed by the competition from the newcomers, with whom they have also had to compete for public services, like medical care and schools for their children, as well as for accommodation and road space or seating on public transport, whose growth has not kept pace with that of the country’s population, as a result of the sustained high levels of immigration of which New Labour has been so fond.New Labour vainly hopes to find a remedy in a new-points system by means of which in future, they claim, they will be better able to regulate immigration to ensure it meets national need, but it is all too little and, what’s worse, too late.
Those who have suffered most from New Labour’s badly misnamed policy of so-called ‘managed migration’ and who, for the most part, have been its traditional supporters look set to punish the party which has let them down so badly by deserting it in the polls for far-right parties offering much tougher remedies.
http://www.socialcohesion.co.uk/blog/2007/04/hmg_wakes_up_too_late_to_the_d.html