Labour still doesn’t grasp public anger at immigration

The population increased by four million under that government

Yvette Cooper’s speech on immigration yesterday illustrates the huge gap between the public and politicians. The shadow home secretary’s remarks amounted to an elegant camouflage for Labour’s absence of policy on the key issues. The central issue is not whether immigration is good or bad, but what is a desirable scale — given that 77 per cent of the public want it reduced, 50 per cent “by a lot”.

Ms Cooper made her speech on the day that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) finally admitted failing to count all the migrants from Eastern Europe when the Labour government, alone except for Ireland and Sweden, opened our labour market to them in 2004. The new figures bring net foreign migration on their watch to nearly