British jobs for whom?

Immigration isn’t a topic much discussed nowadays, because it’s one where the Tories and Lib Dems don’t agree. That’s a shame. Because there’s an urgent problem to be fixed in the British labour market: that every time the economy grows, it sucks in immigrant workers. If this dysfunction continues, it will finish Cameron. The News of the World (where yours truly is a columnist (£)) has today looked at the latest figures for this. I reprint them for CoffeeHousers below. They show that during that disastrous fourth quarter in 2010, where the economy shrank by 0.5 percent, the number of employed British-born people fell by 110,000. As grim as you’d expect. But the number of foreign-born workers actually rose – by 7,000. This fits a trend. David Cameron and IDS rightly lambast the last government for the fact that almost all of the jobs created in the boom years can be accounted for by higher immigration.