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"British Jobs For British People"
Can you imagine David Cameron trying this on? Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced a crackdown on immigrant workers, while pledging to create "British jobs for every British worker".
Brown's plan is twofold. First, migrant workers from outside the European Union will face tougher tests. The Independent reports that they must speak, read and write English to GCSE grade C standard (which is hardly reassuring). The points system which filters potential workers according to the demand for their skills is to be toughened up, too.
The second part of the scheme is a series of measures designed to put jobless Brits on the "fast track" to employment.
Brown is concerned by figures which show that many hundreds of thousands of Britons are "economically inactive." Some live on benefits, others exist on disability or incapacity allowances. Many have given up hope of finding work. The huge numbers of people who do not work and who do not show up on official unemployment figures embarrass the government, as they cast a large shadow on the UK's much-touted high employment levels.
Of course, this being Labour, Brown is dressing up his proposals as a step towards "full employment": Further details are due to be revealed during Brown's speech to the Trade Union Conference, but the scheme is said to include plans to match schooleavers with employers and to match the "economically inactive" with major employers - such as supermarkets - who need staff.
Brown is playing to both sides of the political fence here in a way Conservative leader David Cameron wouldn't dare. "Full employment" was the vision of the Old Left. The plan to tighten up "points" for migrants is controversial in some European nations: France's Nicolas Sarkozy came under fire from the left when he pledged to use the system (popular in Canada and Australia) to allow France to manage immigration better. It also allows government to say it is doing something to grapple with the tide of immigration, even if its real impact is negligible.
If Cameron even mentions immigration, never mind a policy of ass-kicking to get Britain's unemployables stacking shelves, he is roundly condemned from both within and without his party for stirring up right-wing populism. Cameron has allowed himself to be manoeuvred onto a centre ground which has made traditional right-wing issues out of bounds for debate. Brown, who can easily play to the left, is also having fun making forays into the traditional territory of the right. Meanwhile Cameron flounders in the centre. It's political genius, of a sort.
