Wonderful for/against arguments in here to do with immigration; very good material for pushing into Level 5:
Mass migration is covering up the scandal of out-of-control welfare
Few politicians will dare to address worklessness when it is far easier just to import more migrants
Jeremy Hunt made a cruel but still quite interesting point in his Autumn Statement speech this week. Labour, he said, grows the economy by importing foreign workers and doesn’t much care about unemployed Brits. Conservatives, by contrast, use “the potential we have right here at home”. He’s quite right to say that immigration lets governments ignore social problems by recruiting industrious workers from abroad. He’s right to talk about it as an economic drug, but wrong to suggest the Tories haven’t been getting high on it for years.
We had the latest update yesterday. David Cameron famously pledged to get net migration down to the “tens of thousands” even though it was closer to 250,000 under his premiership. Then, Brexit came along – and, with it, complete power over border control. How have the Tories used this power? By ratcheting up net migration to more than six times Cameron’s target: we found out yesterday that the annual figure is 670,000. This covers up what would otherwise stand exposed as a full-scale crisis in the welfare state.
Having new arrivals settle at the rate of 3,000 a day is quite something, relatively new to Britain. We had more net migration in January this year than in the Windrush period – or, come to think of it, the whole of the last century.
But newcomers are certainly needed in a country where 4,000 people a day apply for sickness benefit. Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has caused outrage by saying he’ll crack down on this but even he doesn’t plan any changes before 2025.
Why the slow progress? Because our welfare system is out of control. It’s sucking people in at a rate that leaves ministers shocked and sickened, but unable to change. Stride’s reforms are good and necessary, but he has been advised that even these changes will land him endless lawsuits and judicial reviews by campaign groups adept at using lawfare to fight the Government. And yes, the Tories should have cleared up this legal mess long ago – but they were preoccupied by Brexit, Covid and regicide. The consequences of all this distraction are now becoming clear.
Now, consider the politics. Reforming welfare is a political suicide mission: get it right and you’ll be riddled with bullets and resented for trying tough love. Get it wrong and you’ll be castigated for being cruel and heartless. Ken Loach will make a critical film about you. And who is out there demanding reform? “I’d say only three people,” a minister told me recently. “Mel Stride, Jeremy Hunt and you.” So there are columnists for whom this is an obsession, but not very many other people. Employers like these skilled, affordable migrant workers. The Treasury likes the tax revenue they bring. Who wants to bring all this to an end?
Migration allows the cover-up of the biggest welfare problems the country has ever seen. I recently asked Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, if he knew that 18 per cent of his city were on out-of-work benefits. He didn’t. The figures are worse for Birmingham, Glasgow and Liverpool (all 20 per cent), Middlesbrough (23 per cent) and Blackpool (25 per cent). In the 1980s such figures would have been seen as a scandal: how could a fifth, or a quarter, of entire cities be on the dole? Businesses would not be able to grow. They would be forced to raise wages to entice people to work, or provide training.
But mass immigration offers an alternative, and it is one we have silently chosen to take. So we don’t notice the missing workers: the real total (5.5 million) doesn’t show up in the official claimant count. If you know where to look, you can find shocking projections: 2.8 million claiming sickness benefits now, for example, and that’s expected to rise to 3.4 million by the end of the decade. An increase bigger than the population of Bristol, swallowed up by this system. A social problem? Absolutely. But an economic one? Nothing that mass migration cannot solve.
It feels churlish to criticise Hunt and Stride when they are doing more about this than any other politician. With Labour, there is just silence. If the problem isn’t getting enough attention under the Tories, it will be getting none under Keir Starmer, who has never spoken about it. His party would have even less appetite for this battle, and tends to see welfare as a public service that anyone can use. To write cheques, approve sick notes and consign people to edge-of-town estates has always been the more expensive but politically easier option.
We should at least stop being surprised by the huge numbers. We can expect net migration to stay high: about 400,000 next year, slowly settling at about 250,000 in a few years’ time. More than twice Cameron’s target. Don’t expect housebuilding to proceed at anything like the same pace. The newcomers will keep flattering social and economic statistics. They’re more likely to be in work, now, than natives.
But we can see the effect in our economic figures: this year’s economic growth of 0.6 per cent would be a 0.3 per cent decline on a per-capita basis. The UK-born workforce has not risen much since 2010: two-thirds of employment growth (and 80 per cent of it since the Brexit vote) is down to migration. We’re very good at integration; at finding great newcomers and welcoming them. But Britain is also quite good at not discussing the problems facing those at the bottom: and that is the risk we face.
Why is it that white working-class boys are the demographic least likely to go to university? Why are 400 people a day being written off as being too sick to do any work? And even after the reforms announced this week, why should we now see a future where we consign literally hundreds of thousands to the same fate?
If the Brexit vote was intended to nudge Britain towards a more cohesive economic model, then it’s hard to say that it has worked so far. I’m not at all confident that a Labour government would do any better. So yes, Hunt and Stride’s reforms may not be enough. But at the moment, they really are all that we have.
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