British Jobs For British Workers?

Although he didn't explictly say it, Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith has adopted Gordon Brown's phrase; of "British jobs for British workers". It's a reluctant acknowledgment of the most important issue facing this country as far as the voters are concerned - immigration. It is also an example of how pathetically helpless our MPs really are.

Firstly Iain Duncan Smith accepts that immigration is an issue:

While stressing that immigration plays a vital role in British society, he will argue that many immigrants end up doing jobs that could easily be done by British citizens.

But of course the elephant in the room regarding immigration is that controls on EU citizens coming to this country are not possible; a point even the presenters this morning on BBC Breakfast acknowledged. The director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, David Frost, says (my emphasis):

"They expect young people to come forward to them who are able to read, to write, to be able to communicate and have a strong work ethic," he said. "Too often that is not the case and there is a stream of highly able Eastern European migrants who are able to fill those jobs. They are skilled, they speak good English and, more importantly, they want to work."

So will IDS as part of his radical reform of the welfare system advocate withdrawal from the EU that would return control back to us regarding our own borders? I think we all know the answer to that question. Another Tory pretending that we govern our own country.

Then following on from that, effectively - IDS, a Minister of State is telling companies to break the law by discriminating against foreign workers in favour of British workers; a direct breach of the Equality Act.

Yet again we have more empty rhetoric from the Tory party, when will their supporters learn? Exit from the EU and repealing the Equility Act are within the power of Tory Ministers and again they fail to rise to the challenge.

And what about IDS' boss - well he had better things to do today like running about in an Aston Villa football top.

Taking a leaf out of his mentor's book on 'being shallow is the new shallow' he thinks it's important to pretend to like football and we all know he doesn't really.

Presumably Cameron thinks that a Villa football strip is a perfect choice because they are not in the Home Counties but are instead based in a city with marginal constituencies. See look how 'working class' and 'down with the normal chap' he is?

Actually on reflection Villa is rather a symbolic choice for Cameron, probably not for reasons he would like. They are run by foreign owners, have delusions of grandeur (still thinking that they are a big team but aren't), are facing a challange for dominance by their upstart neighbours, have not won anything significant since the mid-90's and destroyed important parts of their hertitage to replace it with vapid and insipid new 'improvements'.

And even then I bet Cameron has no idea what the Holte End is.