Immigration

The furore surrounding the defence secretary is distracting attention from some stories that are threatening the coalition’s tranquillity. Benedict Brogan reports that the Health Bill is being amended out of existence by a cabal of Lib Dem peers, a campaigned that was mooted during the party conference season. The rebellion is apparently aggravating Number 10, which understood that Nick Clegg had secured his party’s support for the diluted programme which emerged after the recent “listening exercise”. Labour’s numerical superiority in the House of Lords means that ministers will have to be at their most mellifluous to bring the errant Lib Dems back to the fold, because Tory backbenchers are clear

‘Cat-flap’ is the story that just won’t go away. A report in today’s Guardian claims that the whole story may have been lifted from a speech made by Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party. One colleague of May’s tells the paper that “Not only has Ms May been caught out making up stories about the Human Rights Act for cheap laughs, she has been plagiarising her clap lines from the UK Independence party.” In the grand scheme of things, this is hardly the most serious charge. There’s just enough truth to the cat anecdote for May to have some ground to stand on and most Tories, understandably,

Ed Balls’ choreographed apologies earlier today included the acknowledgment that “we should have adopted tougher controls on migration from Eastern Europe”. He first adopted this stance during last year’s leadership election, when he offered an undeliverable but popular objective to court the ‘Gillian Duffy tendency’, who had turned away from New Labour. What began as classic opposition politics is now the party line, with Ed Miliband telling delegates yesterday, “We got it wrong in a number of respects including understating the level of immigration from Poland, which had a big effect on people in Britain.” And there are stories in today’s Mail and the Express about the deleterious effects of

Yesterday, we introduced our new “Right to reply” series, where outside writers take on some of the ideas and arguments raised on Coffee House. In that case, it was the IPPR’s Matt Cavanagh replying to Fraser’s recent post on immigration and the labour market. Here’s another reply to the same post, this time by Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research: Myths abound when it comes to the effect of immigration on the labour market — and the most damaging of these is that most or all “new jobs” go to migrants. Although I agree with Fraser Nelson’s general views on immigration, he is misleading on this one point.

George Osborne was right to boast in the Commons that Britain has the “second highest rate of net job creation in the G7”. Coffee House recently pointed out that all of the increase is accounted for by foreign-born workers. But what if you narrow the definition to foreign nationals? We put in an information request to the Office for National Statistics and the below information came back. It is quite striking. Over the 12-month period to which Osborne refers, 90.1 per cent of the extra employment amongst the working-age population can be accounted for by an increase in foreign nationals working in the UK. Here are the figures. The phenomenon of pensioners returning to

Last week, George Osborne boasted that Britain has the second-fastest job creation in the G7. In tomorrow’s Spectator, we disclose official figures showing that 154 per cent of the employment increase can be accounted for by foreign-born workers. We on Coffee House have often questioned Labour’s record: 99.9 per cent of the rise in employment was accounted for by foreign-born workers. The graphs for the Labour years and the coalition year are below:     The idea of 154 per cent is strange, so I will reproduce the raw figures below:     Now, no one outside Westminster expects the UK labour market to change the day a new government is elected,

Theresa May has banned an EDL march in Telford tomorrow, although the organisation will be allowed into the town to conduct a static demonstration. May has been a hive of hyperactivity since she returned from holiday, and this is yet another example of the government making a decisive gesture to amend for its perceived earlier indifference. It also looks like a strategic decision to contain that other unspoken working class resentment: immigration, and the hint of racial tension that it inspires from time to time. David Cameron was at pains yesterday to insist that the riots were a cultural issue, not a racial issue. He’s right. I’ve spent the last