What happened to British jobs for British workers Mr Brown…?

As the election race gets underway it appears Gordon Brown is off to the worst start with news that one of his greatest statements was a big lie. Immigration is very much at the centre of this election campaign and it has emerged that virtually every extra job created under Labour has gone to a foreign worker.

Figures suggest that an extraordinary 98.5 per cent of the 1.67million new posts were taken by immigrants. The Tories have seized on this revelation as evidence that the Government has totally failed to deliver its pledge of ‘British jobs for British workers’. The Shadow immigration minister Damian Green revealed unpublished figures showing there are almost 730,000 fewer British-born workers in the private sector than in 1997. If you want to doubt this then simply book into a hotel in and around London where you almost certainly be met with Polish staff – this is also the situation elsewhere around the UK.

There were 23.8million British-born workers in employment at the end of last year, just 25,000 more than when Labour came to power. In the private sector, the number of British workers has actually fallen. The number of posts for people of working age has increased since 1997 by over 500,000, to 20.5million.

But the number of British-born workers in the private sector has slumped by 726,000, from 18.4million to 17.7million.

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