4 out of 5 of new jobs go to migrants?

That is the headline on the front of this mornings Daily Mail.

This harks back to the scandal in October when the Tan, Peter Hain also incidentally Secretary of State at the Department of Work and Pensions claimed that of the 2.1 million jobs he claimed had been created since 1997 only 800,000 had gone to migrants. This figure was found to be wrong and went up to 1.1 million and then 1.5 million whilst in turn the number of jobs claimed seems to have dropped to 1.7 million. Even the alleged Home Secretary Jacqui Smith managed to get embroiled in the scandal with her own dodgy figures.

David Davies has said this makes a mockery of "British jobs for British workers" as clearly this has not been the case, as well as being highly illegal.

Frank Field has called for eastern Europeans to be banned from working here. That is understandable, but wrong. You can't remove rights like that once given. However we do need to be much more careful in future.

The political issue here is this though. People will vote on the pound in their pocket at the next election, not the pound in someone else's. That is how they will decide how the economy looks. For all the claims of how the mass immigration of the last 10 years has helped the economy it has done little to make the average man or indeed woman in the street feel better off. Their wages are under more pressure whilst all their costs are rising, including council tax and the cost of housing.