Generation betrayed

MEANWHILE, away from the economy, Ed Miliband makes the literally incredible claim that only Labour can be trusted to repair our broken immigration system.

This from the party that, over 13 years in power, allowed uncontrolled immigration on an historic scale to change for ever the social and cultural landscape of this country, without a scintilla of permission from the public.

Consider yesterday’s startling analysis by Migrationwatch of the legacy of the government in which Mr Miliband served.

This shows that at the height of mass immigration between 2005 and 2009 – before the Tories’ efforts (admittedly, deeply disappointing) to bring it under control – nine out of every ten new households formed in the UK were headed by people born overseas.

It concludes: ‘ If each additional immigrant household over the last ten years had been provided with a new dwelling, we would have had to build the equivalent of 133,000 homes a year. That is one every four minutes.’

As this paper has always acknowledged, many migrants work extremely hard – often taking low-paid jobs that Britons refused to accept before Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms began to make work more rewarding than benefits.

But in the light of this study, is it any wonder we have a housing crisis, forcing up prices and rents, while intolerable pressure has built up on the NHS, schools and other public services? Yet even now Labour refuses to countenance setting any upper limit on the numbers to be let in.

Mr Miliband is fond of referring to today’s under-30s, priced out of the housing market, as ‘Generation Rent’. More pertinently, these victims betrayed by his party’s reckless migration policies should be known as Generation Labour.