Unemployment has risen by 70,000 in the quarter to February 2013. But it is not all bad news, or at least the bad news is bad but for reasons that are n0t necessarily obvious. Almost all of the increase in the ranks of the unemployed has been accounted for by women choosing to change their status from ‘economically inactive’ to ‘looking for employment’. So it would seem that we are not talking about 70,00o people having lost their jobs in the three months to December. On the contrary, we are looking at what could be considered positively as 70,000 women deciding to do something about the economic circumstances facing their families.
Of course not all of these 70,000 women will necessarily be looking with great energy for a job. Many of them might quite like some extra income for their families, and would take on a part-time job if it were offered them. But merely stating that you are looking for a job has never been quite the same as being willing to take on any employment as a matter of urgency.
The question posed by this increase in unemployment is therefore not the most obvious one – where have these jobs gone? Since it does not appear that the increase is due to many employees being made redundant. The question is in fact – why can these extra 70,000 job seekers not find employment? Clearly the job market has not contracted, since the numbers in employment have continued to rise, but jobs are not being created quickly enough to absorb those who are now looking for work when a few months before they had considered themselves ‘economically inactive’.
70,000 is an interesting number. It is more or less the amount of net migration which the Government considers to take place each quarter. None of the reports in the media about the increase of unemployment have mentioned the effects of migration at all. But it is a fairly obvious matter of common sense that if 70,000 migrants have come to the UK looking for employment then they must either have found work which one of these 70,000 women could be doing, or have not found work and are being counted as unemployed among the same women. Either way the effect of migration on unemployment cannot and should not be ignored. Yet our politicians, and the mainstream media seem determined to do just that.
Unless it can be shown that the 70,000 net migrants who come into the UK each quarter have taken up specialist employment in Polish grocers and the like then we must assume that they have taken up employment which could have been performed by British people. This isn’t xenophobia. It’s common sense. We can’t criticise the Government for unemployment increasing (of course we can), if we are unwilling to face the causes of unemployment. 10 million immigrants cannot help but affect the job market for British people in a negative manner. The 2.5 million people who are unemployed, many of whom are themselves migrants, could be practically put into useful work if immigration, especially of unskilled and poorly skilled workers, were brought to a halt, and those migrants with the least claim to residency were required to return to their homes.
Otherwise every 70,000 net migrants every quarter will inexorably increase the levels of domestic unemployment. We can’t complain about the latter if we will not do anything about the former.