In defence of UKIP's immigration policy

Last night's Question Time gave one statistic that absolutely justifies UKIP's immigration policy.

There are currently 2 and a half million unemployed people in the UK and only 440,000 job vacancies.  That's 5.68 unemployed people for every job.  Meanwhile, net annual immigration into the UK is approximately 210,000.  Assuming only 1 in 4 immigrants are looking for a job (women, children and eastern European mafioso don't usually work) then that adds another 52,500 people to the unemployment figures, either because they aren't working or because they take a job that an unemployed person already living here could have had.

People who advocate immigration controls are usually denounced as racists or inhumane because just think of all those poor asylum seekers and people who want to come and make a better life for themselves.

Firstly, asylum is not the same as immigration.  Asylum is where someone at serious risk of death, injury or human rights abuses in their own country is allowed to live in another country where they are safe from persecution.  Immigration is where someone decides to move to another country because they want to.

Secondly, whilst everyone should have aspirations and the opportunity to improve their lot in life, they don't have the right to degrade other peoples' quality of life to do so.  People need to work and they need somewhere to live.  There aren't enough jobs and houses to go around the people who already live here - whether they've been in the country a week or whether they can trace their ancestry back to Alfred the Great.  Allowing another 210,000 people into the country will put more demands on the job and housing market with disastrous effects for people already living here.

There is a myth that's put about by immigration fans that we need immigrants to do the jobs that people already living here won't do.  It's simply not true that you won't find 440,000 people out of those 2.5m unemployed that will do the rubbish jobs.  They will do them if they are better off employed - even in a crap job - than they are unemployed and UKIP's flat tax policy will do just that by taking low paid people out of the tax system altogether.

For some reason Nigel didn't take the opportunity to talk up UKIP's immigration and flat tax policies (although he did mention the latter) which is a shame.  But it was still a good show for UKIP and during and after Question Time, the word "Farage" was trending worldwide on Twitter.

To finish on a completely different topic to the one I started with, did anyone else notice that in the trailer for Question Time, David Dimbleby announced that he had "four major politicians" for the show?  UKIP is well and truly in the mainstream and Nigel Farage is more popular than ever.  Something you certainly couldn't say about Michael Heseltine who was frankly an embarrassment.