Brown tries to draw the sting on immigration
Spent the morning in the Thurrock constituency – Labour majority 6,000. Some polls suggest this sort of majority is the real current front line in Labour-Conservative marginals.
It’s currently Andrew MacKinlay’s seat. BNP leader Nick Griffin plans to stand here. Before we went, we spoke to Professor Richard Webber (the man who invented Experian’s Mosaic computer programme which all the main parties now use to track down voter types).
The parties’ private polling suggests there are millions of voters all over the country who put immigration amongst their top three concerns. We wanted to find the people who put it first and for whom it could change the way they vote.
Professor Webber’s map showed up red dots marking postcodes where we would find them. In the marketing jargon, they are areas dominated by a social group tagged “Clocking Off” – that’s a group of mainly white communities, often hit by unemployment in manufacturing or refinery work, often in relatively low-cost, owner-occupier housing.
We turned up at the postcode Professor Webber suggested and stopped folk at random in the street. It was uncanny. We found plenty of voters who had voted Labour but were thinking of voting for the BNP.
And we also found that toxic mix that worries Labour strategists – voters who are angry about immigration but are also alienated from the main parties by the expenses scandal.
On Gordon Brown’s announcement today on shutting the door on non-EU consultants and skilled workers, it’s far from clear what the impact on immigration numbers would be.
He’s said the 12,000 available consultants’ jobs should not be made available to non-EU would-be immigrants under the points system, but there are 7,416 non-EU consultants in total in the NHS. There was never going to be 12,000 new non-EU consultant arrivals.
A Home Office source said: “It could be that just two of the jobs” went to non-EU applicants. These are “available posts”, not expected inflows.
The pressure group MigrationWatch and others say this is a drop in the ocean because the real net immigration comes from non-EU immigrants given right to remain and then bringing in their families, not from individuals who enter under the skilled employment points system.
The Conservatives don’t intend to make as much of immigration in their general election campaign as they did under Michael Howard in 2005. Part of the point of Gordon Brown’s speech today was to “draw the sting” from the issue, a Number 10 aide told me.
But this issue will come into the debate in the 2010 election, and it has the power to shift some votes.
UPDATE: Apologies. Nick Griffin is NOT standing in Thurrock now but has decided to stand in Barking instead.
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