Today’s Times has a headline designed, I suspect, to make the blood boil. “Idle Britons are allowing Romanians to take jobs,” it says – paraphrasing the conclusion of Mariana Câmpeanu, Romania’s labour minister. This echoes a widespread idea repeated even by some British politicians. Especially those who argue that we need mass immigration to grow the economy because our own people won’t do the jobs.
It’s true that many Brits don’t work: the number on out-of-work benefits never fell below four million during the Labour boom years and 99.9 per cent of the rise in employment during 1997-2010 can be accounted for by extra immigration. The same is also true under the Tories: most of the employment rise that George Osborne will boast about tomorrow is accounted for by more foreign-born workers (see below).
Buy how many members of parliament – in Romania or Britain – would work at an 84 per cent tax rate? I certainly wouldn’t.
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