Oliver Kamm

Though I believed Gordon Brown was unsuited to high office, I voted Labour at the 2010 election. I usually do, depending on the merits of the candidate (there are various Labour candidates I wouldn’t vote for and some, such as Ken Livingstone, whom I’ve voted to defeat). Among the limited number of positive reasons for my preference is that, in government, Labour has presided over important social reforms on issues including abortion, gay rights, and racial and sexual equality.

It’s depressing, therefore, to read Ed Miliband’s declaration in The Sun that “the Labour Party I lead will listen to people’s worries and we will talk about immigration”. It’s a disingenuous as well as illiberal argument.

If there’s one thing that British politics has not lacked in the 45 years since a Labour government passed the discreditable and discriminatory Commonwealth Immigration Act, it’s talk about immigration. (When I was growing up in Leicester in the 1970s, race and immigration made up almost the entire local political debate.)

Miliband says: “We know low-skill immigration has been too high and it should come down.”

No, we don’t. There is some evidence that immigration has pressured the wages of low-wage workers, but it’s not obvious that tighter controls on immigration would help. A more direct and equitable policy would be a subsidy for low-wage employment, as argued by Edmund Phelps, the Nobel laureate.

The debate about immigration’s effects on employment and wage levels is bedevilled by the “lump of labour” fallacy – the notion that a complex economy has a fixed amount of work and that a net inflow of people increases unemployment and reduces wage levels. In fact, inward labour migration often stimulates the creation of more jobs. Immigrants are a source of demand and can be an opportunity for particular sectors to expand.

Miliband’s insistence that public-sector workers speak English is a populist non sequitur. The economy has structural weaknesses but there is scant evidence that this is one of them. As Tim Harford pointed out in the Financial Times on Saturday, if there is any such problem in the public sector, it “will not be fixed by the sticking plaster of Mr Miliband’s ‘simple rule’”.

Immigration controls are not too loose but too tight. In discouraging asylum seekers and imposing higher age limits for foreign marriage partners, legislative changes have had had no good effect while increasing the sum of human unhappiness.