by JOHN GRAYSON
The numbers game around immigration statistics has turned into a bloody battle.
In January, Polly Toynbee called the Coalition’s benefits campaign to stir up ‘prejudice against the poor'[1] a ‘bloody battle’. It had, she wrote, initiated a ‘clever marketing’ campaign ‘where slippery figures abound’ as part of a ‘virulent debate’ designed to stir up ‘a gale of public opinion’ to persuade ‘80% of the people that the poor are the problem and welfare the cause of the debt crisis’. But this analysis fits parallels the campaign and debates on immigration statistics running throughout January.
This other ‘bloody battle’ – on immigration, was clearly designed to deflect political opposition from record figures on unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, and to ‘blame the immigrants'[2] for unemployment, and to widen the ‘bloody battle’ on welfare ‘reforms’ to ‘migrants on the dole’ and ‘benefit tourists’ from the EU. An underlying theme was to continue discrediting Labour’s record as one commentator noted: ‘Cameron and Osborne, when worried about an issue, still think and act like an opposition. They are swift, intensely political, and relentlessly focussed on their opponents’ in the Labour leadership’.[3]
Thus the political campaign on immigration statistics kept returning to Labour’s record – the media reminding us of Gordon Brown’s xenophobic speeches, on his ‘British jobs for British workers’ pledge and yet, as Chris Grayling and Damien Green described it in the Daily Telegraph, ‘Labour didn’t care who landed in Britain’.[4] The Tories’ political narrative constantly blames Labour for ‘out of control’ immigration which it uses as the rationale for the alleged powerful ‘cap’ the government has now placed on immigrant numbers.
Benefit tourism and the Eurosceptics
The numbers offensive which began on 6 January had been foreshadowed in the background campaign by Eurosceptic Department for Work and Pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, which started with an EU Commission decision in September 2011 objecting to Britain’s rules on welfare, claiming they discriminated unfairly against foreigners.[5] Duncan Smith argued in September that ‘benefit tourists’ could cost ‘British taxpayers tens of billions of pounds’: ‘what the EU is now trying to do is get us to provide benefits for those who come to this country with no intention to work and no other means of supporting themselves, with the sole purpose of accessing a more generous benefit system … These new proposals pose a fundamental challenge to the UK’s social contract. They could mean the British taxpayer paying out over £2 billion extra a year in benefits to people who have no connection to our country and who have never paid in a penny in tax’.[6]
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