Ed Miliband today promised new measures to prevent British people being ‘locked out’ of jobs by foreign workers, including forcing firms to declare if they employ high numbers of immigrants.
Overseas-only employment agencies would be banned and an early-warning system set up to highlight areas where locals are ‘dominated’ by an influx of overseas labour under the proposals.
While there cannot be set quotas on home-grown workers, urgent action is required to identify where British jobseekers need better training to compete, the Labour leader said.
In a major U-turn, Mr Miliband said the party became ‘disconnected from the concerns of working people’ during its 13 years in power.
Labour often tried to silence criticism of its immigration policy by suggesting it was inspired by racism while in office.
The announcement represents a major change of direction for the party after Gordon Brown branded voter Gillian Duffy a ‘bigoted woman’ for raising concerns about the impact of immigration during the 2010 election campaign.
Mr Brown was forced to apologise to Mrs Duffy, 65, after he met her to smooth over her anger after insulting her.
It was one of the key moments in the election campaign and was see to signify how out of touch Labour had become on immigration.
As he got into his car, Brown was still wired to a Sky News microphone and was overheard telling an aide: ‘That was a disaster.. They should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? Ridiculous.’
Asked what was wrong, Brown responded: ‘Everything, she was just a bigoted woman.’
Mr Miliband said Labour made a mistake by allowing uncontrolled migration into Britain in 2004 when Poland and other eastern European states joined the EU.
He said demanding that job centres be told of all firms where more than one in four staff is from overseas would form part of the new system to provide Whitehall and town halls with vital information.
Mr Miliband hopes to shift the focus of the debate from border controls, and what he says are ineffective Government caps on arrivals, towards the impact on people’s daily lives.
While restrictions on new arrivals, including caps on people from any new EU member state, are necessary, reforming the jobs market is just as important, he argued.
Stricter enforcement of minimum wage laws and doubling fines to £10,000 would also form part of an effort to stop firms using cheap foreign labour to undercut domestic jobseekers.
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but the gang masters are still going strong paying rubbish money to those in the gang but also taking rents off them and you call this legal,if no gang masters would there be more work for those living here ,and for this lot of our gloriuos mps we aint got a lot of hope i dont care whot colour a man or woman is we all bleed red so why do they bring that card up every time jeff3
I’m glad he raised the point but it’s not something he is teaching me, mass immigration is a huge problem, a problem that will eventually sink this country If nothings done about it very very soon.
It has nothing to do with colour etc, it has everything to do with the bloody numbers, we cannot even afford to take care of our own nationals let alone other nationalities, our schools are failing, we cannot house people, crime is out of control, poverty is increasing, immigration is not the cause of all our problems but it is a major problem, talking about immigration doesn’t make you RACIST OR A BIGOT?