Jonathan Portes and the strange world of the migration lobby.

I only read stories in the papers which are actually surprising.  Most of them aren't.  North Korea on brink of nuclear meltdown?  Really?  Donald Trump does something daft?  No!

But a couple of things in the Times this morning caught my eye.  This first was that in a story entitled "Plea for barista visas to keep coffee shops running", the Migration Watch head Lord Green is reported as arguing for two year visas for young people to help the hospitality industry.  I'm slightly suspicious of Migration Watch, and it was strange to find Lord Green saying something so liberal, and, it must be said, so daft.

The paper's Leader, probably written by Oliver Kamm, also had things to say about migration, and came close to acknowledging the flaw at the heart of the pro-migration case.

Those of us sceptical about the merits of unrestricted migration have argued for years that it has a distorting effect on the labour market. If you increase the supply of something the price of it tends to do down. Fine for the affluent like me who get cheap access to the service industries. A disaster for the low-paid however (and that's to say nothing about the impact on the NHS, school places or the availablity of housing).

Ah, say the pro-immigration types like the egregious Jonathan Portes, but this is to fall victim to the lump of labour fallacy, the idea that there is one fixed body of work to be done which does not grow according to the number of people available to do it. Migrants, argues Portes, create jobs by just being here.  Every 100 migrants who come to the UK create more than 100 additional jobs.

I once tried to get Portes to say how many jobs each 100 migrants create. This was on Twitter, so it was not a particularly sophisticated exchange. Portes would not (could not?) give a figure. He blocked me. Our exchange must have left an impression on him however because - I still follow him - he referred to me only the other day in an exchange with someone else, well over a year later.

Still, you get the picture. Migration is a great creator of employment.

That being the case, what would happen if you cut migration? It's obvious. The number of available jobs would start to decrease. If fewer migrants come to the UK, fewer jobs will be created and unemployment would go up.

This would, you might imagine, be the cry of those arguing for more migration. But curiously it is not. From all corners of academia and business the fear is not of higher unemployment. It is of a labour shortage.

What happens if there's a labour shortage? The price of labour goes up. The Times leader could not bring itself to acknowledge this. It warned of higher prices, but it could not bring itself to accept that this would be because people would be paid more.

The pro-migration lobby wants it both ways. More migration equals more available jobs. But less migration equals more available jobs too as there will be fewer foreign workers to fill them. It's an argument that the Mad Hatter would have been proud to own.

In the meantime the UK has nearly one million unemployed people under the age of 24.

If only we could be sure of more foreign workers to help them into the world of work!

PS Jonathan Portes has now started urging journalists to question Tory politicians about the "cost" of reducing migration to tens of thousands per annum. This has been predicted by the OBR to be in the region of £6bn p.a. Portes' enthusiasm for this idea has reached the BBC's Reality Check department, set up by the corporation to challenge "fake news". But hold on. The OBR's is a prediction. It is an economic forecast. Its value is pretty close to zero. Economic forecasts are there to be revised upwards. Or downwards. One can understand a lobbyist like Portes jumping on the OBR forecast like a ram on a sheep at tupping time; but the BBC? Don't they know what a forecast is? Apparently not. Not much of a Reality Check, but a pretty handy stick with which to beat the Government.

The Great Repeal Bill, Gina Miller and the SNP

So Article 50 has been triggered at last, as the British ambassador yesterday delivered Theresa May's six-page letter to Donald Tusk, the EU president.  It was hard not to feel sorry for Mr Tusk, one of the EU's better individuals. He did not deserve to be singled out for the UK's Dear John letter ("It's not me, it's you"). Despite the many months of warning he looked shocked and close to tears as he uttered a few words of response ("We miss you already").

I'm not so sombre; but neither am I exultant. The referendum was always a choice between two things which were very nearly equally unsatisfactory. I'm not going to crow about the achievement of something I felt would be marginally less bad than the status quo.

(Incidentally, I wonder how Gina Miller felt yesterday when she saw the news. I suppose it would depend on how much of her money she got back following her Judicial Review. Not all of it, I hope.)

In so far as there will be any benefits from Brexit, one of the more obvious ones is the return to Parliament of powers under the so-called Great Repeal Bill, which will put reams of EU legislation directly into UK law. Sadly, this has not been obvious enough for Sir Keir Starmer. The Labour Shadow Secretary for Brexit has been urging the Government to undertake that workers' rights in EU legislation will not be watered down once the legislation has been transferred.

Sir Keir doesn't seem to have noticed that part of the point of Brexit is that Westminster can make its own laws, and that workers rights is only one amongst many fields in which the government could now act. If the government wants to restrict workers' rights it can do so (although you may think it has bigger fish to fry just at the moment).  It could also extend workers' rights if it wanted to. You might think Starmer would welcome this power, as perhaps he might if he thought there was any prospect of Labour winning an election.

Instead he seems to think that we should keep forever laws agreed by previous governments along with 27 other EU states, rather than amending them from time to time at the wishes of our own government. 

It's a curious kind of political cringe. If a law was passed by the EU it must be good, and we must keep it. Why? It is precisely because acting within EU tied the hands of our own parliament (in so many fields, not just workers' rights) that so many in the UK felt we had to leave. 

Of course for sheer stupidity the SNP can outdo Labour any day. Its Westminster MPs are calling on the government to hand control over farming and fisheries to Holyrood. Anything else would be a "Westminster power grab".

To appreciate how ridiculous this is you have to understand that the SNP would prefer that control of farming and fisheries would remain with Brussels. 

Yes, that's right. The SNP would prefer to have those policy areas dealt with in a forum where Scotland is represented as a tiny minority of the UK's 1-in-28 voices, instead of a Westminster parliament where Scottish MPs votes count as about 1 in 10 (and are in fact over-represented, according to the Boundary Commission).  Moreover inside the UK there is every chance that in future farming and fisheries could be devolved to the regions.

Has anyone heard the SNP complaining of a Brussels power grab recently? Has anyone heard them demanding the return of powers over fisheries and agriculture from Brussels? No. On the contrary, the SNP is determined, upon Independence, to return to the EU's embrace as quickly as it can.

Truly these people are stupid.

Katie Hopkins, Mishal Husain and Khalid Masood - blind deaf and dumb

The first casualty of any terrorist atrocity is common sense.  Here, following the murder of PC Keith Palmer and other innocent people outside Parliament yesterday, is a selection of utterances.

"Islam is no more responsible for this attack than Yorkshire is for Jo Cox MP's murder".

This one came from Mishal Husain, the BBC presenter. It does make you wonder what degree of intellectual calibre she brings to the job. What Ms Husain does not appear to have noticed is that Yorkshire, unlike Islam, does not have an ideology.  It is the combination of that ideology with, no doubt, other influences (which might include mental health problems, drugs and general criminality) that makes an Islamic terrorist. After all, there are not many Yorkshire terrorists (and the one who killed Jo Cox was not a terrorist because he was a Yorkshireman).  There are not many terrorists without an ideology. There are no golfing terrorists, for example. Or stamp collecting or estate agent terrorists. As someone put it today, British Islam has 5% of the population, 95% of the terrorists. The idea that Islam has nothing to do with the preponderance of UK terrorist attacks is frankly stupid.

"This has got nothing to do with immigration because the guy was born here".

A general trope on social media, this one. I've yet to discover how many generations back the murderer's ancestors came to Britain, but it makes not a jot of difference. The UK has admitted a lot of people who adhere to a religion which often holds British values in contempt. For the majority of Muslims, immigrants or otherwise, that just means living peaceful but somewhat separate lives. For a small but significant minority it means treasonable violence. Their place of birth is irrelevant. It is the ideology which has been imported.

"The response of the medics who tried to save the murderer's life is a magnificent tribute to British values".

Unfortunately this is only partially true. If there is any inference to be drawn from the murderer's birthplace it is that some Britons now hold a different set of values altogether. Whereas the laudable desire of bystanders to save the murderer was Britain at its best, the murderer was a Briton too. His set of values encompassed driving his car as fast as possible into people he had never met and who could not conceivably have done him harm, before taking a knife to the person of a policeman whose job it was to protect our democratically elected representatives as they went about the business of governance. We have to accept that these are the values of a small minority of people whose ideology has been allowed into Britain. If we don't do that we are just deluding ourselves.

"Violence will not work".

On the day of Martin McGuinness's funeral (some wag asked, "Will we ever find out where the body is buried?") a moment's reflection should remind us how wrong this is. Does anyone really imagine that the Good Friday agreement would ever have been signed had it not been for the violence? Violence does work. It may not have worked for Islamic extremists yet, but that's only because there hasn't been enough of it.

"Everyone gets on fine in London".

To the extent that this is true it is only because communities tend to live parallel lives (and see below). Besides, does anyone remember Muslim Patrol, the fundamentalist vigilantes of the East End?

"The cancer of radical Islam in our society . . . . needs to be cut out".

Little though I like him, I don't think Paul Nuttall is exaggerating in describing radical Islam as a cancer. But how can it be "cut out"? Had the murderer survived the Westminster incident he could not have been deported. He was born in Kent. He could have been sent to prison of course, where he would have been free to radicalise impressionable young men, just as he was radicalised himself by other Muslims not currently in jail. But you cannot "cut out" British people. You can only try and persuade them that they are wrong. You could start by ceasing to treat Muslims as if they were something separate and un-British. You could start to turn back the tide of multiculturalism and identity-politics. But it would only be a start. There would still be a long way to go towards a goal that was always receding.

"Liberals convince themselves multiculturalism works because we all die together too".

And lastly Katie Hopkins, writing in the Daily Mail.  Ms Hopkins characterises the conflict as, "The patriots of the rest of England versus the liberals in this . . . city of lead, so desperately wedded to the multicultural illusion that it can only fight those who love the country the most".

Perhaps it's a mistake to take Ms Hopkins too seriously.  She over-emphasises for shock value. But regarding London she has a point. London is a unique place, emphatically not like the other cities only bigger. It is an international city, which has lost much of its "London-ness". Manchester is still defiantly Mancunian, Glasgow is still Glaswegian, and so on. Not London. Partly that's because London attracts people from all over the world, who go there believing they can make it big and have a good time. By definition they are the last people to mind others being different from them. It's one reason why they go there.

But London is not a community or series of communities. It is a hive of individuals. On the flip side its tolerance shades into indifference. People live alongside others utterly different from them by not interacting with them. It can be a lonely city. People famously do not talk to each other. David Goodhart's new book The Road to Somewhere characterises these people as "Anywheres", which is to say they are often well-educated, affluent and unrooted types (of which I guess I should be one) with everything to gain from maintaining the status quo. Their liberalism is theoretical and involves little personal sacrifice.

This phenomenon is of course a subject for another day, but Hopkins may not be wrong when she writes that London is an "entire city of monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Blind. Deaf. And dumb".

Nicola Sturgeon? Give me Donald Trump any day.

A few days ago I posted a piece which argued that Nicola Sturgeon knew Scottish independence would be a disaster for the poorest in her country. Yet she persisted with the policy because, I suggested, she hated the English far more than she loved Scotland.

Today comes a delicious reminder of Ms Sturgeon's very special qualities.  She told Sky News's Sophie Ridge that iScotland would "keep the pound".  She said sterling is "our currency as much as it is the currency of anywhere else". This is an informative statement.

While true up to a point (although it is also true of any other currency you care to name, including the Azerbaijani manat), it ignores that iScotland would have no central bank and no lender of last resort. It also ignores the fact that the Bank of England would no longer be taking into account economic events in Scotland when setting interest rates. It isn't an exaggeration to say that using the pound post-Independence would actually make Scotland less independent rather than more, because Scotland would lose such influence it currently has over monetary policy.

It would also make it harder and more expensive for Scotland to borrow money on the international markets; and as we've already discussed, Scotland is going to have to borrow an awful lot of money if it leaves the Union.

But there's more. I noted in previous posts that Ms Sturgeon is nothing if not well-informed. She knows all these things. She knows what she says is misleading to the point of dishonesty. She also chooses to use words which encourage grievance. Notice that she says sterling is "our" currency, as if all Scots could be subsumed within the possessive, and as if anyone had proposed to take it from them (no-one has: they've merely pointed out that sterling is the currency of the Union, and any country choosing to leave it will fall beyond the remit of the Bank of England's powers of assistance).

There's an interesting comparison here with Donald Trump. Sturgeon tells her supporters things she knows aren't true. She uses language to try and stir up their feelings. So far so similar. The National, the SNP's free-sheet, told its supporters today that the GERS figures, which show with pitiless clarity how stuffed iScotland would be, are unreliable. Scotland must move beyond GERS.

GERS are the Scottish government's own figures.

The principal difference however between La Sturgeon and the US president, liars and manipulators both, is that Donald Trump genuinely if mistakenly believes his policies are for the benefit of his countrymen. Nicola Sturgeon knows they are not.

Give me Trump over Sturgeon any day.

There is a very special ignominy reserved for Ms Sturgeon. In one scenario she fails to take Scotland out of the Union and retires from the field defeated. In another, more dire, she succeeds. It is a disaster, and she lives to be reviled. If it happens, it will be richly deserved.

Has Brexit shot the SNP's fox?

Since the Brexit referendum it's been fashionable amongst Remainers to point out that those who loved the UK so much they wanted to wrest it from Brussels' sticky embrace might, by having voted to Leave, end up driving the Scots out of the Union.

Scottish adherents of this view - stand up Alex Massie of The Times - tend to imply that in voting the way it did, England should have spared a thought for the Scots, ignoring the fact that as we all trooped to the ballot box last June we had no idea how Scotland would vote, and that in any event not caring much either way was part of our democratic right.

I am however slowly coming round to the view that Brexit might actually make Scotland less likely to leave the UK than more.

It's all about the timing.

It now seems pretty certain that there won't be a referendum pre-Brexit. This drastically changes the nature of the offer the SNP can make. A referendum held while we are in the EU enabled the SNP to say, "Once we're independent we'll just carry on as before". This would probably not be true, because iScotland would probably be out of the EU; but it was a pitch that was made by the SNP in 2014 and it is not readily disprovable.

After Brexit this argument will no longer fly. Scotland would be out of the EU and would have to decide whether to reapply. If it applied it would have to join the Euro. I doubt whether this is a sellable proposition.  Comically, the SNP had almost worked this out, which is why Nicola Sturgeon said before the weekend that Scotland might not reapply for EU membership, and might consider joining EFTA or the EEA instead. A handy way of parking the Euro issue, you might think.

However it was only a matter of hours before someone pointed out how strange it was that the SNP should cite Brexit as justification for a second referendum, but then say that Scotland might not rejoin after all.

At the time of writing the SNP's policy has veered back to renewed membership.

That might have changed by the time you read this.

If Theresa May holds her nerve (and whilst I'm sure Nicola Sturgeon is a "bloody difficult woman", Ms May is a bloody difficult woman with a lot more power) there will be no 2nd referendum until after Brexit, possibly not until after the Holyrood elections of 2021, and possibly not at all if the pressure of incumbency tells on the SNP and it cannot muster a majority.

Of course even if I'm right about this, it's arguable that without Brexit there would have been no pretext for another referendum, and that the Nationalists would have remained quiescent. That may be true. But don't forget that the SNP leadership are grievance-seekers and their members zealots. It's not hard to imagine that they would, as the crest of the Nationalist wave receded, clutch at some straw - perhaps a renewed Tory mandate in 2020 - as a pretext for another poll.

Whatever, it looks as if next time Independence is an option at the ballot box Scotland would face losing the Barnett subsidy, having to make EU financial contributions, having to make eye-watering spending cuts to reduce its deficit to an acceptable level, joining the Euro, losing free movement of its citizens to the rest of the UK and losing free access to its largest export market in order to be able to trade freely with a smaller one across the North Sea.

All that because of Brexit. I'm waiting for Alex Massie to say thank you.

Nicola Sturgeon and the two types of SNP supporter

There are two types of SNP supporters, and they can be neatly separated by attitudes to the annual GERS statistics, compiled by Scottish civil servants to show Scotland's income and expenditure.

These statistics show that if Scotland were independent now it would have to find an extra £1700 or thereabouts per person every year just to maintain public spending at its current level.  That's because Scotland gets about £1500 p.p. p.a. more than citizens in less fortunate parts of the UK (courtesy of the Barnett Formula), and because Scotland raises about £250 p.p. less by way of tax revenue.

The first type of SNP supporter is the person who has never heard of the GERS figures, or who has but does not understand them, or who fears they may contain something nasty and would rather not look, or who understands them only too well but maintains they are inaccurate.

Then there are those who understand the figures, understand their consequences for an independent Scotland, understand what they mean for services used by the poorest Scots, but just don't care.

The first category I would class as pitiful, ignorant and/or self-deluding.  I feel sorry for them, because they are dupes.  But it's the second who really get up my nose; and particularly the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon.

We are constantly being told what a clever and shrewd politician Ms Sturgeon is.  Although she has done some stupid things (telling us there must be a 2nd referendum because we are leaving the EU, but then admitting that Scotland may not rejoin anyway is only one of them), I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt on this.

I also believe that she is well-informed.  She is the First Minister of Scotland and she has lived and breathed politics all her adult life (and probably a lot of her adolescence too).  So she will have seen the GERS figures.  She will know what they mean.  

She will know that iScotland will either face spending cuts of some 15% post Independence (cuts of a severity that George Osborne, on a Class A high in his gimp-suit could only dream of); or it will have to raise taxes across the board by a swingeing degree; or it will have to borrow an awful lot of money (despite not having its own currency or a central bank).  Ms Sturgeon knows all this, and she knows what the consequences will be for every Scot who uses the health service, education system or is in receipt of benefits.  

Here's a piece of circumstantial evidence which supports this hypothesis.  The Labour leader Kezia Dugdale put the reality of Scotland's deficit to Ms Sturgeon at Holyrood the other day.  Sturgeon did not even attempt to address the issue. She snapped back a phrase familiar to Holyrood-watchers. Dugdale was, she said, "talking Scotland down".  If the First Minister could refute Dugdale's point, she would have.  She cannot. She knows it. But she is still arguing for Independence.  

Why?  It is it at this point that I run out of answers.  A decent person, politician or no, wants the best for his or her country.  I believe that the overwhelming majority of British politicians outside the SNP want this.  At some deep and grudging level I even believe it of Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage. But I don't believe it of Nicola Sturgeon or Alex Salmond. I believe that they are motivated by something far, far deeper and visceral.  How else to explain their enthusiasm to take their country on a race to the bottom?  I think they would rather bury Scotland in a dungheap so long they chose which one.

What it so unattractive about this is not the suspicion it arouses that Sturgeon et al hate England far more than they love Scotland. No, it's that they personally, no matter how bad things got post-Indy, will be OK.  No doubt the speaking engagements, the newspaper articles, the media appearances, the non-exec directorships and finally the generous Holyrood pensions will sway comfortably into view for Ms Sturgeon. She would retire to some West of Scotland retreat amid the carnage of her country's reduced circumstances, secure in the knowledge that the consequences of her mistakes could not touch her personally.  Arguing for Independence is easy for her, because she will be immune from its consequences.

Comically, Ms Sturgeon appears to believe that she holds the moral high ground. Scotland must be independent, she intones, because it operates to a superior set of values to Tory England. That may be so. But not the part of Scotland she occupies herself.

Nicola Sturgeon - impulsive gambler

So this morning Nicola Sturgeon has announced she will put in hand the legislation required to start the process for a 2nd Independence referendum, to take place between the end of 2018 and spring 2019.

I think this announcement reveals Ms Sturgeon to be a gambler.  It seems to me the act of someone in a weak position who has played her strongest card early, knowing that the longer the game goes on the smaller the chance she has of winning.  It also confirms that, far from being the clever politician of popular wisdom, she is impulsive and prone to fits of pique.

The SNP doesn't like Brexit much, and Scotland voted by a significant majority to Remain. In the immediate aftermath of the Leave victory Ms Sturgeon made a number of remarks which gave her supporters to understand that this was a game-changing event which would inevitably lead to Indyref2.

This was a mistake, because it left her with so little room for manouevre. It forced her subsequent management of events into choice between backing down, thus infuriating her own supporters, or following through with a process which she cannot be remotely sure will result in success. The tone of her announcement, and the way she handled the press afterwards, suggest decisions made in genuine anger. Really clever politicians don't do things in anger.

Having been forced by Brexit and by her own rhetoric into putting the Indyref2 process into motion, Sturgeon has decided to go early rather than wait for events. She knows she cannot afford to have the referendum after Brexit, because, faced with a choice between ceding sovereignty to Brussels and being in the Union, Scots may well think that remaining in the UK looks the more attractive option. Moreover, the longer she waits, the more her party's record in government will be scrutinised.

It's actually quite hard at the moment to work out what the SNP's policy on Europe is. Mrs Sturgeon left this tantalisingly blank in her announcement today. Are they in favour of EFTA membership? Or of being in the EEA, keeping the pound in both options (with all the disadvantages that entails, including the absence of a central bank)? Or they in favour of joining the EU, which would almost certainly mean adopting the Euro (that did after all used to be SNP policy)?  Sturgeon has conspicuously failed to be specific on this, but she'll have to commit herself long before any referendum.

Being in the EU means losing the rebate and swallowing the Euro. It may mean tariffs and a hard border. Remaining in the UK means maintaining the Barnett formula, and retaining tariff-free access to Scotland's biggest export market. Scots may well wonder why they should leave a Union which has served them well for three hundred years in favour of one which is widely perceived, even by its supporters, as undemocratic, bureaucratic and corrupt. It is bizarre that Mrs Sturgeon should be so upset about "leaving the EU single market" when as part of the UK Scotland is already part of a single market which is significantly bigger.

So the fact that Sturgeon has gone for the quick contest tells us a good deal about what she considers to be the nature of the battlefield.

A further point.  Ms Sturgeon herself does not have the right to call a referendum. She has to pass legislation at Holyrood (something which will require the support of the Greens), and then ask Westminster. Mrs May has little option but to accede to such a request, but she can decide the timing of the referendum. She should play hard-ball. She can say, "Yes, you can have a referendum. But not till after Brexit." Sturgeon would huff and puff, but May's position would be perfectly defensible. She can point out that it is unreasonable to expect Scots to make an informed decision when they don't know the nature of Brexit. As it happens I expect that we won't have a signed Brexit deal within two years from now, but there's absolutely no reason why May should allow a referendum until a deal is signed.

If I were Mrs May I'd point out that I am Prime Minister of the whole of the UK, including Scotland, and that Mrs Sturgeon is merely the woman elected to run 10% of it.  I'd say that I'm negotiating the UK's decision to leave the EU, and that I certainly don't intend to jeopardise the UK's chances of getting a good deal by allowing myself to be distracted from the job in hand by the SNP's desire for independence.

Sturgeon could of course defy Westminster, and have a referendum anyway. The No faction should then call for a boycott. An unlawful referendum would have no legal or moral status.