The ex-bosses chief, Digby Jones, has been all over the media proclaiming how good all this immigration is for the economy; and of course it's good -- for firms. It is not good for people, nor for the taxpayer; certainly in the long run.

Talk to an economist with expertise in migration and he will tell you that any policy of mass immigration of low or unskilled workers will push down the wages of those already low paid, if not force them out of work.

Worse than this, every semi-skilled or skilled worker who arrives is one less chance for someone to try to get themselves into the labour market by training. It's great for firms who now don't have to pay for this -- and it helps to hide how bad is our education system.

It's not so great for the poorly planned public sector, which is training highly skilled staff such as nurses for positions it has already filled by recruiting abroad.

As Frank Field pointed out, not one of the newly trained medical staff in his constituency had found a job as a direct result.

What happened to the idea of reducing inequality?

What happened to the "high wage economy"?

With a population that is both ageing and reproducing less, we have the opportunity to follow the model of several countries on the continent. Instead we are repeating on a grander scale the mistakes of the recent past.

The textile industry we once had in the North of England was in dire need of investment in high tech to compete internationally given higher domestic wages. Instead, we imported cheap labour from the countries of competing textile industries to displace the indigenous workforce who couldn't live on the low wages, and textile manufacture struggled on.

This lasted only until the threshold for necessary investment was so high that when this became the only option the mill owners simply cut their losses and shut the whole industry down.

The taxpayer now pays for two sets of unemployment: the original indigenous workers and their migrant replacements.

What happens now that the whole economy is to an extent run on similar lines?

The next time the economy turns down, the taxpayer will pay for all those amongst the millions of legal and illegal migrants who become un- or under-employed -- together with the additional huge costs of over-stretched infrastructure, that will have to be augmented or restructured.

This means that immigration is now a major part of the reason for the ratcheting ever upwards of the proportion of everyone's income taken as taxation.

The consequence is a progressive disincentive to work, for ever larger slices of what we used to call the working classes.