Labour's Employment Shame As 92% Of Jobs Go To Migrants

GORDON Brown’s attempt to silence election debate on Labour’s immigration record was shattered last night.

Official figures revealed that more than nine out 10 of the 1.7 million jobs added to the economy since 1997 have gone to workers from overseas.

They also showed that nearly 300,000 fewer British-born workers were employed in the private sector than when Labour came to power.

The figures provoked renewed fury over the Government’s open-door policy just weeks before polling day. Critics seized on them as devastating proof of the complete failure of the Prime Minister’s pledge to provide “British jobs for British workers”.

Shadow Immigration Minister Damian Green said: “This is the final proof that Gordon Brown was misleading the public.

“He has left British workers in a worse position than when Labour took office 13 years ago.”

Last month, Mr Brown warned that critics of Labour’s immigration policy were appealing to the “worst instincts of nationalism and xenophobia” – comments that were seen as an attempt to neutralise the controversial issue, which many voters see as the Government’s worst policy failure.

Earlier this year, Mr Brown claimed credit for creating more than two million jobs.

“If we had said 12 years ago there would be, even after a global recession, 2.5 million more jobs than in 1997 nobody would have believed us,” he said in a speech in Glasgow.

But figures from the Office National for Statistics Labour Force Survey, disclosed to the Spectator magazine yesterday, showed those who had benefited were almost entirely migrants.

They showed that 1.7 million jobs had been added to the economy since 1997 once workers over retirement age were excluded. Of those, 1.6 million had been taken by immigrants.

The huge proportion – 92 per cent – is even bigger than previously thought.

British-born workers in private sector jobs fell from 19,020,000 in 1997 to 18,732,000 while over the same period the number of immigrant workers doubled to nearly three million.

Anger over Labour’s immigration record erupted at the final Prime Minister’s Questions session in the Commons before the General Election.

From the Tory benches, Mr Green asked the Prime Minister: “You once notoriously promised British jobs for British workers.

“Can you confirm that the latest official figures produced this morning show that the number of UK-born private sector workers is several hundred thousand lower today than it was in 1997?”

Mr Brown angrily claimed that putting a limit on immigration would do “great damage to British business”.

He added: “Net migration to this country has been falling as a result of actions that we have been taking.

“It has fallen in the last three years, and it is falling because there are more people here getting the jobs that are available.

“The Conservative Party should think twice about their policy of quotas on migration, because the very businesses they are quoting want to be able to bring people to this country to do the jobs that are necessary.”

Foreign Secretary David Miliband was also accused of using misleading figures yesterday.

In a BBC radio interview, he claimed that half the 160,000 people who came into the country last year were British people returning.

But the population think-tank Migrationwatch pointed out: “He was referring to net immigration for 2008, which was 163,000, but none of them was British.

“Of the total of 590,000 who arrived in 2008 only about one in seven was British.”

Migrationwatch chairman Sir Andrew Green, said: “If Cabinet Ministers cannot get the facts right, how can they possibly have an effective immigration policy?”

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