Unemployment down again, Project Fear try to spin it negatively

Unemployment has decreased by a further 16,000 since July and remains at its lowest rate for a decade in the latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics.

The Guardian have added together the number of unemployed people and the number who aren't working or looking for work to contrive a 6,000 increase in unemployment and claiming it is a sign that the economy is slowing down because of Brexit. They've even rolled out their fellow Project Fear propaganda merchants, the CBI, to back them up.

During the same 3 month period that unemployment has gone down by 16,000, net immigration will have been around 84,000. That's also about the same number of people who came here in the last 12 months looking for work so from that we can infer that about a quarter of net immigration is unemployed people, or about 21,000 net unemployed immigrants in the last quarter. That means a real terms, net increase of about 37,000 jobs in the last 3 months.

The CBI knows this, of course, which is why they chose to gloss over the employment figures and criticise the 2.6% increase in average salaries which is higher than they predicted. The CBI says this is hitting works in the pocket despite inflation currently sitting at 1.2%, less than half the average increase in earnings.

The British Chambers of Commerce, which was officially neutral on the EU referendum but sacked its Chief Executive for privately expressing support for Brexit, has also chimed in to predict that unemployment will increase to 5.5% by early 2018 despite being on a downward trend throughout the period of uncertainty caused by the lack of planning for a Brexit vote.

Project Fear's "experts" have been getting it wrong for so long it's a wonder they're given any credibility whatsoever but with so much of the establishment media having staked their reputations on things going horribly wrong it's understandable that they're desperate for anything they can spin negatively to vindicate their discredited position on Brexit.

Latest unemployment figures prove Project Fear wrong AGAIN

Figures out today show that unemployment is down, the number of people out of work and not looking for work is down and the percentage of working age people in work is at a record high since records began in 1971.

Project Fear told us that the economy would tank if we voted to the leave the EU, that millions of jobs would be lost and that companies would abandon the UK in droves. Instead, we see fewer people out of work, companies making big investments in the UK and investors putting their faith in our future prosperity.

If things are going this well during a period of economic instability and political uncertainty caused by David Cameron's refusal to plan for Brexit then just imagine what it's going to be like when there's an actual plan and some firm answers on our relationship with the EU and the rest of the world.

Sorry George, did you have something to say?

More than 2.2m EU immigrants now live in the UK

Official figures have put the number of EU immigrants living in the UK at 2.2m.

With the ONS deliberately under-reporting the level of immigration in other reports the true number is likely to be much higher.

Meanwhile, there are 1.7m unemployed people living in the UK and an extra 474k people came to live here last year, most of which will be chasing the same jobs as the 1.7m unemployed people already living here.

Uncontrolled immigration is bad for the economy, it drives down wages, drives up unemployment and hits every one of us in the pocket when our taxes go up to pay the benefits bill.

For every unemployed person in the UK there is an EU immigrant working here

Unemployment is up for a second quarter by 25,000 to 1.85m people.

In other news, there are now more than 2m EU immigrants working in the UK.

If immigration reflected actual need then we'd let about 250,000 people move here and then allow in the number of people we need to fill the vacancies we have at the time. Net immigration last year alone was 260,000 which is clearly unsustainable. We can't afford to support 1.85m unemployed people and their families as well as a quarter of a million largely low skilled, low paid economic immigrants.

UKIP policy is to freeze economic immigration for 5 years to allow the 1.85m unemployed people who already live here fair access to the job market and then reintroduce economic immigration with strict controls on the number of people and the skills they have.

Immigration up, unemployment up ... do the maths

The Office for National Statistics has published some pretty gloomy unemployment figures today.

Unemployment rose in the UK in the final quarter of last year by 118,000, leaving 2.685m people out of work.  Unemployment rose slightly in Scotland but decreased in Wales and Northern Ireland.  Clearly the devolved governments have a better handle on unemployment than the British government.

The media all have some pretty extensive coverage of the news and the BBC ironically quotes an "expert" from RBS - which has been sacking people in England and moving jobs to Scotland - saying that it's not going to get better any time soon.

Nobody seems to be drawing a correlation between the rise in unemployment and the fact that net immigration last year was 227,000.  Assuming three quarters of those immigrants were, or should, be seeking active employment (given that a large proportion of immigrants don't come with 3 generations of benefit-seeking hangers on as the Daily Mail would like you to believe) that's 170,000 people looking for jobs over and above the two and a half million people that already live here who are also looking for jobs.

It's clearly unsustainable yet only UKIP has a policy that will deal with the problem - ban economic immigration for 5 years and then allow limited immigration with a points-based system to ensure we only get sustainable immigration and the skills we need.

Working immigrants cost taxpayer £2.25m last year

Yesterday the British government announced the latest jobless figures, revealing that youth unemployment is now up to 1.2m.

The figures also emphasise the need to control immigration - something that only UKIP proposes to do.  Last year 280,000 people in the UK lost their jobs whilst 150,000 newly-arrived immigrants found gainful employment.

In 2009 the cost of an unemployed person was estimated at £8,000 per year.  Someone working 40 hours a week at minimum wage will make an annual contribution to the Treasury of £1,681 in income tax and national insurance contributions, assuming they get no other benefits such as income support or tax credits.  Being generous and assuming 50,000 of the 150,000 are skilled professionals and earn an average of double the median average wage of around £20,000 per year, they will pay £10,434 per year into the Treasury - again, assuming they don't claim any other benefits.

Identifiable public expenditure per person in England is £7,121 per year so each of the 150,000 unemployed people already living here who are claiming unemployment benefits because 150,000 jobs they could have been doing went to newly-arrived immigrants costs the taxpayer £15,121 every year they're unemployed.

We don't need immigration.  Not economic immigration anyway.  We need some people who have skills that are in short supply in the UK but we don't need to import factory workers, taxi drivers, farmers and cleaners - we have at least a million unskilled, unemployed people in the UK who can do those jobs.

UKIP policy is to freeze economic immigration for 5 years so that vacancies can be filled by people already living here and then applying a points-based system to control immigration after that point.  Labour and the Tories both adopted their own watered-down versions of UKIP's points-based immigration policy but without the absolutely key 5 year freeze and of course without applying it to immigrants from EU states.  Almost two thirds of the 150,000 newly-arrived immigrants who secured jobs - 93,000 people - were from the 2004 EU ascension states of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

While we are in the EU we have no way of limiting the number of people coming from EU member states to live and work here and when they do come they have to be given the same benefits as people already living here - the same social security benefits, the same access to social housing, the same access to the job market, the same access to health and education services.  All of the services that workers have been paying into for decades only to find them under-funded and over-stretched when they need them.

The message that these figures send out is clear and loud - there aren't enough jobs to go round the people who already live here, we don't need any immigrants.

Unemployed people can't survive on £24k per year tax free?

A letter from Eric Pickles to David Cameron has been leaked claiming that up to 20,000 people could be made homeless and another 20,000 forced to move if the ConDems go ahead with plans to cap benefits at £500 per week.

Erm, £200 per week?  £2,000+ per month (£24,000 per year) tax free for not working and people might not be able to live on it?  What sort of lifestyle does someone have to live to be able to spend more than £500 per week without any of the expense of going to work?  The median average wage in the UK is £499 per week and 32% of that goes to the taxman in Income Tax and National Insurance to pay people not to work.  If someone working full time and earning the national average wage can survive on ~£388 per week after tax, why can't an unemployed person manage on 25% more than that?

The problem here isn't the amount of benefits someone gets paid, it's the amount of people on benefits.  Iain Duncan Smith's laughable plea to companies to employ young people from this country rather than cheap immigrants last week shows that he understands the problem but of course the British government's hands are tied because of the EU.

Cheap foreign labour is abundant because anyone from an EU member state is allowed to come and live and work here.  Average wages in some eastern European countries are 20% of what they are here so it pays to move over here, send money home and you can even claim benefits for the family you've left behind at our expense.  And then there's non-EU immigration which we aren't allowed to cap because the EU said it was illegal.

Giving money away for not working isn't the answer.  People need jobs so they can support themselves without needing a big chunk of everyone else's wages to pay their bills.  There are 2.5m unemployed people in the UK at the moment and 400,000 jobs were created in the last year.  That should have taken the unemployment figure down to 2.1m and saved the taxpayer a good £8bn off the social security bill.  With that extra money in peoples' pockets they could have been spending more and stimulating the economy which creates more jobs but instead 87% of those jobs were taken by immigrants leaving the unemployment rate largely unchanged.

Cheap foreign labour might seem like a good idea to businesses but it's a false economy.  The more unemployed people there are, the more tax the British government needs to pay for them.  The more tax employees pay, the more employers have to pay.  The more money the British government needs, the more tax it will attempt to extract from companies.

UKIP policy is to freeze all economic immigration for 5 years and then introduce a points-based system to ensure we only get immigrants with skills that we need.  This doesn't affect genuine asylum seekers who would continue to be allowed into the country to protect them from danger in their own country.  A 5 year freeze on immigration would allow people already living here to take up the available jobs that are mostly going to immigrants and to house people who already live here.  There aren't enough jobs or houses to go around the people who already live in this country, we don't need immigration.