News

Years ago when I was a student I took a temporary holiday job at the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys - now part of the Office of National Statistics - and what a sorry place it was. Day in day out I was ticking boxes and checking endless questionnaires surrounded by incredibly bored and disaffected clerical officers, several of whom were hugely earnest, Little Red Book-brandishing Maoists from Middlesex University. What a waste of public money we were. I would hope that most of our efforts are now performed by machines.

The news that the number of British nationals in work has fallen in the past two years as 540,000 foreign workers have replaced them is pretty amazing stuff. Hilarious that the Conservatives find it 'profoundly disturbing'. Why? If Gordon Brown is really going to give 'a British job to every British worker' then he's going to have to reform our dysfunctional education system and work out a method of getting the hardcore unemployed back into work. These two tasks have stumped New Labour since 1997.

It seems to be incredibly un-PC to say it, but one of the conclusions that we can draw from the figures is surely that the indigenous population either cannot or will not fill the available job vacancies. But I cannot at this point launch into a tirade into the inadequacies of the UK workforce compared to their Polish counterparts. The bathroom I had done in my house recently was marked by incompetence on an epic scale - demonstrated by Brits, Poles and even someone who has previously been in the media and now masquerades as a plumber.