The Daily Mail‘s Tim Shipman quotes Peter Mandelson at a rally for the think-tank Progress:
In 2004 when as a Labour government, we were not only welcoming people to come into this country to work, we were sending out search parties for people and encouraging them, in some cases, to take up work in this country.
Shipman frames the comments as “a stunning confirmation that the Blair and Brown governments deliberately engineered mass immigration”, but I see no evidence of that. Instead, it sounds like Mandelson is talking about the sort of programmes which were aimed at getting high-skilled immigrants to come to Britain – you know, like that one that David Cameron went to India to promote.
The fact is that programmes to attract migrants who could bring rare skills or high investment to Britain are the absolute least that a minister with a portfolio like Peter Mandelson’s should have been doing. The BMA estimates a cost of £270,000 to train a doctor, rising to over half a million pounds for a consultant. Those costs are “for the most part, borne by the wider NHS”; so if nothing else, it makes sense to “send out search parties” for foreign doctors to encourage them to come here. So long as the search parties don’t cost £200,000 a person, at least.
And it gets even better if you encourage entrepreneurs to come over to Britain. We’re talking about people who will bring money to Britain and spend it on creating work. That’s basically the holy grail of immigration policy, and something that even the Daily Mail usually supports.
In fact, the extent to which Britain should run “search parties” is entirely linked to the extent to which the Daily Mail’s preferred migration policy becomes law. If we have an open borders policy, it doesn’t really matter which people apply to work in Britain – the idea is that the growth in working-age population provides a boost to the economy almost regardless of who comes over. But when we start capping the number of migrants, then it becomes much more important that we encourage those who’ll provide the most economic benefit to Britain to apply for visas, while discouraging those who might provide only a marginal boost to the economy. That’s the logic of the Government’s negative advertising in Romania and Bulgaria, for instance.
Of course, none of that matters if your reasons for not liking migrants aren’t economic but, er, “cultural”. But the argument that Mandelson’s search parties “made it hard for Britons to get work” isn’t based in fact, but in that curious sort of common sense economics which has little relation to the real world. In reality, they were exactly the sort of policy which the Daily Mails should adore.
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