Opposition Labour Party leader Ed Miliband is greeted by staff as he arrives at Pensby High School for a general election campaign visit.
Reuters/London
British opposition leader Ed Miliband said yesterday that he would set up a new government unit to prosecute employers who exploit migrant workers if his Labour Party wins power in the national election on May 7.
In a major speech on immigration — a widespread concern among Britons that has bolstered the anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party — Miliband set out how Labour would try to ensure immigrants did not depress British wages.
“We’ll make it a criminal offence to undercut pay or conditions of local workers by exploiting migrant workers,” he said in a speech in northwest England.
More than 600,000 people migrated to Britain in the 12 months to September, up from over half a million the year before, while average wages in Britain have failed to rise significantly despite falling unemployment.
The Conservatives and Labour are neck-and-neck in one of the closest elections in decades. Both parties want to regain former supporters who have drifted to Ukip, which once attracted about a fifth of voters but has more recently seen its own appeal ebb.
Labour would set up a dedicated unit in Britain’s interior ministry to prosecute employers who paid migrants less than the minimum wage or broke other employment laws, Miliband said.
“This exploitation of the worst kind isn’t just bad for those people directly affected, it drives down living standards and conditions for everybody else,” Miliband said.
Miliband also reiterated Labour plans to hire an extra 1,000 border staff and ban recruiters from hiring exclusively abroad, and said that the last Labour government had erred by not imposing temporary curbs on migration from eastern Europe.
Prime minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party and Ukip leader Nigel Farage both said yesterday that none of these measures would reduce immigration.
Most economists say increased immigration has boosted British economic output since the financial crisis, and see little evidence that it has reduced wages in most cases.
Separately, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, senior Conservative minister Michael Gove said his party would not do a deal with Ukip on a vote-by-vote basis, even if it failed to secure an outright majority after May 7.
“I don’t want to say anything disobliging ... about people in Ukip, but I’ve got no appetite, interest or inclination towards doing a deal with anyone,” he said.
Pressed on whether the Conservatives could make agreements on a vote-by-vote basis, the Telegraph reported that Gove said: “No, no, no. There won’t be.... I don’t think there will be many Ukip MPs — if any — after the election.”
l In Scotland’s biggest city, nationalists have triggered a once-in-a-century shift in political loyalties that could dash Labour leader Ed Miliband’s dreams of winning the May 7 election and thrust secessionist ‘kingmakers’ to the heart of British power.
The shifting currents in Glasgow, the citadel of Scottish socialism for more than a century, show the seriousness of the nationalists’ bid to end Labour’s dominance of Scotland, a significant change in recent British political history.
The nationalist challenge could trigger events after the election that threaten the future of the United Kingdom and possibly its membership of the European Union.
Scots voted to preserve the United Kingdom in a September 18 referendum but the once marginal Scottish National Party (SNP) has spent two decades persuading Scots that it is a worthy alternative to Labour, which many voters say has abandoned its Scottish heritage.
“We’re recovering from a period where the Scottish Labour party wasn’t strong enough, and it wasn’t good enough. And that takes time,” said Jim Murphy, leader of the Scottish Labour Party.
“We’ve got less than three weeks to turn it round but I’m confident that we can,” said Murphy, a 47-year-old teetotal vegetarian who opinion polls show has so far failed to stem a flood of support from Labour to the SNP.
The destiny of Glasgow’s once safe Labour seats will show whether Labour has lost Scotland, a defeat that would scupper Miliband’s bid to win an overall majority in the 650-seat London parliament and potentially give the SNP a kingmaker position from which to bargain for more powers for Scotland.
The loss of Glasgow, a party stronghold for so many decades, would symbolise the extent of Labour’s decline in Scotland and the emerging supremacy of the nationalists.
Labour won all seven of Glasgow’s seats in the British parliament in the 2010 election with apparently unassailable majorities of up to 16,000 votes.
Now all but one are threatened by the SNP, according to John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and Scotland’s most respected opinion poll analyst.
“Glasgow North East is the safest Labour seat in the country and nobody has yet come up with an opinion poll that suggests it could be lost,” he told Reuters. “But everything else in the city is absolutely up for grabs.”
From the banks of the River Clyde, Glasgow’s merchants earned fortunes in the 18th Century from tobacco from America and after the American Revolution disrupted trade, they imported sugar from the West Indies.
Glasgow became one of Europe’s biggest shipbuilding centres by the 19th Century but by the early 20th Century, the docks of “Red Clydeside” were breeding a radical socialism that spooked Britain’s leaders during World War One.
Labour became Scotland’s biggest party in the British parliament in 1922 and the last time it lost Scotland in a national election was in 1955. By 2014, 45% of Scots would vote for independence.
In a small campaign office in a block of council flats, the SNP candidate for Glasgow Central, Alison Thewliss, is trying to sow the seeds of Labour’s defeat.
Asked why so many Scots were turning away from Labour, she said: “They saw Labour joining up with the Tories during the referendum, and it’s hurt people actually.”
Labour’s joint effort with the Conservative Party to urge Scots to reject independence alienated some voters, even those who support the 308-year-old union, she said.
Labour’s potential loss of Scotland illustrates the divergence of England and Scotland and what many Scots see as an arrogant London political establishment that has failed to heed or address their needs.
While Conservative Margaret Thatcher moved England rightwards from 1979 to 1990, Scots stood opposed, especially to Thatcher’s use of Scotland to test an unpopular poll tax.
Her successors, from John Major to Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, broadly accepted Thatcher’s legacy while millions of Scots held to their socialist traditions.
Those traditions go back to the dawn of the British Labour movement when Keir Hardie, the Scottish trade unionist born in Glasgow in 1856, helped found the Labour Party.
As Blair moved Labour rightwards to win voters in England and established the Scottish parliament, the party assumed its Scottish flank would be secure.
That opened an opportunity for the SNP, which pitches itself as the social conscience of Scotland opposed to what leader Nicola Sturgeon calls the crumbling institutions of the London elite.
Just 12 years after the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, the SNP would topple Labour, winning a majority in the 2011 Scottish election.
“Labour has, from the 1970s, been regarded as the natural party of government in Scotland,” said Stewart MacLennan, 64, a former Labour candidate who now backs the SNP.
But now Murphy is greeted on the campaign trail by SNP taunts that Labour, whose party colour is red, are the “Red Tories”, in reference to the Conservatives’ nickname.
While the SNP has added members since the referendum, opinion polls show its share of the vote has risen just a few percentage points.
What has changed is that Scots now appear to have broken a tradition of voting SNP only in Scottish elections and have now also fixed their sights on the London parliament.
Such a change in voting habits could shake the foundations of Britain’s political establishment.
