Frank Field: The young arrivals who now form the new working class

Today’s figures show there are 917,000 young British people unemployed. Immigration is one of the causes
Frank Field19 February 2014
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Today’s unemployment figures contain one particularly disturbing element — the stubbornly high number of young people who are still out of work — 917,000 of them. It’s time to put those figures in context, and to ask the hard and uncomfortable question — whether the numbers of people coming to work here from abroad has a bearing on the numbers of young people out of work here.

Of course, to ask the question isn’t to take away from what the newcomers have to offer. The eagerness to work of many immigrants puts some of us to shame. A mate of mine runs a coffee shop near where I live.

He told me that during his first 10 years of operating his business in London he would find that on most days somebody came in to ask if he had a job, and sometimes there were as many as three or four people.

During these first 10 years not one of these enquiries came from an unemployed Londoner. They were all new arrivals eager to earn a living.

Four years on, he can update this woeful tale. One English person came in to ask for work. But she didn’t last long. Unlike the eager new arrivals, our local Brit, while charming, was unreliable. She could never be relied on to turn up every day.

That tale can be magnified. London has the second-highest number of 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, training or employment. Yet at the same time we’ve had an increase in the size of the population the size of the whole of Birmingham, and most of those new arrivals have found work.

Of course, many schools do a brilliant job. But the awful truth is that in London huge numbers of unemployed young people either don’t try, or lose out to new arrivals eager to work. The question, therefore, to be faced is how long should we pay benefit to young people, many of whom live in areas where there are jobs, even if they are taken by immigrants?

Shouldn’t we have a more level playing field here by limiting the time young people can draw benefit if they live in a buoyant job market?

Let’s put all this in context. Since 1997 more than a million people have come from overseas to live in London. This should have made us face up to some crucial realities.

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One is that compared with many of the countries from where London’s new arrivals have come, our poverty wages seem like the jackpot. Likewise, given the welfare state they’re not used to, our own welfare state looks extraordinarily generous. Advanced Western countries cannot prosper if they have open borders — which we did for a time — or if we pay out welfare to anyone who can prove need, even if they haven’t been in the country that long.

The other hard truth is that London has had its immigrants on the cheap. They’ve been a useful force to push down wages.

As I say, there’s no denying that vast numbers of these new arrivals coming here love to work. But the biggest gainers in this massive increase in the numbers of people wanting to work have been the upper classes, our elite.

A new servant class, equal to that of Downton Abbey times, has been recreated. It’s not upstairs and downstairs any more, though. The elite bring the servant class in when they want cleaning done, ironing, gardening, decorating and so on. Unlike the Edwardians, our monied classes have no intention of living with their servants. But the wealthy Londoners who have benefited from this huge surge in immigration have not had to face the bills to provide the public services that the immigrants need.

Where are the new roads or railways to go about in their daily lives and earn a living? We’ve had some fine new hospital buildings — thanks to the last Labour government — but this hasn’t increased capacity.

Likewise, where has been the school- building programme to match a population increase on this scale?

There’s been no house-building programme to accommodate the sheer numbers coming here, either. So this huge increase in population has had to be fitted into existing homes. No wonder rents have rocketed and we have an increasing number of vulnerable people at the bottom being pushed into homelessness. To build on the scale needed we’d have to be taxing the rich at 95 per cent or more.

What is more, the position is going to get worse in the period up to 2021. Most of us reading this paper will be alive then.

The population of London will continue to become even more out of control — according to most estimates by 2021 it will grow by 750,000, the equivalent of the population of Leeds. Something’s going to give at some stage and I know who will be hurt. It won’t be those who’ve pushed this immigration line as being good for us. They are safely tucked away in their smart areas.

Is it also fair that ordinary Londoners who’ve paid their national insurance contributions for decades find that there’s huge pressure on school places for their grandchildren? And, likewise, is it fair that they are in the same queues for an NHS under increasing pressure? And what of their children fighting for a maternity place?

It’s no use for the immigration lobby to say that all these issues would be solved if we spent more money on our public services. There simply isn’t going to be the money to provide public services on a scale that’s needed to take account of the ever-increasing numbers coming here. The losers have been, and will continue to be, poor Brits. And they will increasingly be joined by those poorer immigrants who find that once here, this world city has a cruel side to it that they are sadly experiencing.

This paper will be addressing the issue of immigration in a debate next month. London Needs More Immigration is the topic. It’s a no-brainer: we don’t. Let the facts speak for themselves.

Frank Field is MP for Birkenhead and a former government adviser on poverty

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