Miliband To Shift Labour's Immigration Focus

In a speech later today Labour leader Ed Miliband will say his party “got it wrong” on immigration while in government.

He will say Gordon Brown and Tony Blair should not have allowed uncontrolled immigration from new EU states in 2004.

Alongside this he is expected to promise to deter firms from exclusively employing workers from overseas and pledge to ban recruitment agencies, which use only foreign workers at the expense of "local talent".

However the Conservatives have said Labour "couldn't be trusted" on immigration.

In 2004, the government allowed free migration to the UK for workers from EU accession states including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

But its estimates that only about 13,000 people a year would come to the country were soon proved wrong, with a peak net migration figure, from the EU and elsewhere, of 252,000 in 2010.

In a speech to the IPPR think-tank, Mr Miliband will say: "It was a mistake not to impose transitional controls on accession from Eastern European countries. We severely underestimated the number of people who would come here. We were dazzled by globalisation and too sanguine about its price.

"By focusing exclusively on immigration's impact on growth, we lost sight of who was benefiting from that growth - and the people being squeezed in the middle who were losing out. We became disconnected from the concerns of working people."

Many within the Labour party blamed the effects of immigration, including the lowering of wages and pressures on social services, for the scale of Labour's defeat in the 2010 general election.

(H)