Have we had the full story about foreign workers? Peter Hain has admitted the figure of those arriving here since 1997 is 1.1 million, not 800,000, and Caroline Flint said on the radio she would like to “acknowledge” that this makes up 8% of the workforce. As many newspapers observe today, this means of the 2.7m “new jobs” created under Labour, some 40% have gone to foreigners. Embarrassing, yes, but surely that draws a line under the affair?
Not quite. CoffeeHousers may remember a recent Home Office submission to the House of Lords which said (click here, p14) that foreigners make up 12.5% of the workforce. And as for the overall total, a parliamentary answer (442W) in July said that, in the first quarter of this year “there were 1.5 million overseas born people in employment who had entered the UK in the last ten years”.
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