Tuesday 11 December 2007

Quote of the day

“ Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.”

Henry Kissinger


Are 80% of UK jobs really going to ‘foreigners’?

Far be it for me to defend the current UK Government in any way. The low opinion in which I hold them - and the many reasons for it should be readily apparent within the posts of CFD.

However there seems to be much interest in the MSM recently over the Statistics Commission study that indicates 1.4 million of the 1.7 million jobs created since 1997, over 80%, had gone to people born overseas.

This conjures up images of hoards of foreigners stealing jobs from the willing, but down trodden British worker. Gordon Brown’s dubious 'British jobs for British workers' sound bite.

Now let’s see if we can spot any weasel words here – ah yes! Not too far to look: ‘born overseas’.

So that will include British citizens born abroad - Not necessarily actually ‘foreigners’ at all then. It would for instance include three of my nieces and nephews, were they not students. That inflates the headline figure by 300,000.

Now those jobs. Exactly what sort of jobs are we talking about here. I don’t have the figures but I would hazard a guess that they are not all well paid highly sought after posts.

Might some include poorly paid work with unsociable hours; janitorial posts, security work, waiting at tables, maybe even fruit picking?

The numbers are high enough to cause some concern, but not legitimately as high as the study claims - and the figures do not tell the whole story.