Brown’s “new jobs” boast is down to immigration

Gordon Brown’s boast of having created “three million new jobs” has always had to come with the major unspoken caveat that (according to the Statistics Commission) 81% of these “new jobs” in this working-age population are accounted for by immigration. Yet for my cover story on immigration tomorrow I asked the Office for National Statistics to do one further exercise for me: break it down by public and private sector. The results were as I expected. In the period Apr-Jun 97 there were 18.1m UK-born people working in the private sector. In Apr-Jun 07, it had actually fallen – to 18.0 million. So strip away immigration and state sector expansion and there are fewer British jobs, not more. The data for the respective period in 2008 is not out yet, but in the current environment it won’t be upwards. The ONS kindly prepared the report for us on request, so I can’t link to it.