Competitive immigrant-bashing: The Tories strike back

Yesterday I commented on the ferocious competition among the leading UK political parties to prove their anti-immigrant bona fides, with UKIP trying to stake out an unassailable position by arguing that they need to stop children of immigrants from going to school. Today the Conservatives are fighting back, arguing that that’s not enough, they need to stop immigrants from having children at all. With this we’re back to 2008, when I first came to Britain (as an economic migrant), and the BBC was fulminating against the “foreign-born mothers” who were costing the NHS £350 million a year in maternity services. The fact that the NHS would grind to a halt if some of those foreign-born mothers were not working as nurses, in the intervals between popping out their expensive babies, was not mentioned.