No Action Offered
‘No action offered on migration’ says the BBC News website headline – a phrase derived from a Conservative party press release by the Shadow Immigration Minister, Dominic Grieve.
This comes after Labour’s Immigration Minister, Phil Woolas had been forced to partially backtrack on comments he’d made in an interview with the Times about reducing the number of immigrants entering Britain.
In a post-Times interview, Phil Woolas told the BBC’s One Show:
I think, frankly, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about the cap…
The European Union population can come and go just as we from Britain go and live in Spain, perhaps, or France - so, too, can others come to our country.
So it’s very difficult to see, even if we are in favour of a cap, what it should be.
And here, for once, we have the truth from a Government Minister – well, almost. Phil Woolas is indeed right that there is ‘a lot of nonsense talked about the cap’. It is nonsense because, as even the dim-witted journalists at the BBC have finally grasped:
Immigration from inside the EU cannot be controlled, and neither can a limit be placed on genuine claims for asylum.
We cannot control immigration whatsoever within the European Union as our old friend EU Commission Directive 2004/38/EC put pay to that. However, in his interview with the One Show, Phil Woolas fails to actually mention the elephant in the room (ie. the role of the European Union). To mention the EU directly in British Westminster politics is just not the done thing.
It didn’t take long for our Shadow Immigration Minister, Dominic Grieve to chime in after Phil Woolas’ comments, saying:
The minister has admitted that behind his words there is no action.
We will do more than give warm interviews. We will introduce an annual limit on non-EU immigration, transitional controls on immigration from new member states, and establish a dedicated UK border police force.
In an article for the London Evening Standard Dominic Grieve also informed readers that:
For a long time ministers buried their heads in the sand, ignoring the problems that uncontrolled immigration was steadily building up.
Net immigration has quadrupled under Labour – fuelled both by the lack of transitional controls on new EU member states and a failure to control economic migration from outside the EU.
So, as you can see, the Conservatives have realised that they cannot control EU immigration (where most of our immigration comes from) by their consistent references wishing only to control ‘non-EU immigration’. They will not actually act as an opposition but instead will content themselves with fiddling around at the margins of a system over which we could have real control if we left the EU. The Conservatives offer ‘no action’ and no choice in part because they can’t and in part because they won’t. Now tell me – who is really burying their heads in the sand?
