Telling Right from Right
Sir: I was very disappointed to see James Forsyth pinning the xenophobe label to Gordon Brown for his comment 'British jobs for British workers' (Politics, 3 November).
The trouble with Forsyth and his kind of Conservatives is their claim that the logical position of the Right is to welcome a free labour market, hence immigration. But they are best described not as true conservatives but as neoconservatives or market-obsessed Jacobins. Just as New Labour shouldn't be confused with Old Labour, so the new Right should be differentiated from the traditional, small-c conservative Right. Traditional conservatives believe in markets as a means to an end, not as the end itself. They do not worship Mammon. Their main concern is that the state should continue to naturally command the allegiance of its people, from which arises their cautious approach to immigration.
Yugo Kovach Twickenham Sir: In your leading article (27 October) you repeat the Home Office claim that immigrants 'contribute £6 billion p.a. to the economy' as if somehow this extra output is available to the rest of us. That is the impression that the government wished to give in their highly tendentious evidence to the Lords Select Committee.
In fact immigrants are not only producers but consumers. Their consumption over time would exactly equal their production were it not for any redistribution via the tax and benefit systems. So it would be as true — and as misleading — to say that 'immigrants withdraw around £6 billion p.a. of goods and services from the economy'. But that would not suit the government's aim of pretending that the native population benefit hugely from large scale net immigration.
The Rt Hon Peter Lilley MP House of Commons, London SW1
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