Tim Wigmore is one of those bright young chaps at the Telegraph who have been tasked with bringing errant Tory voters back into the Cameron fold and away from UKIP. One prong of the strategy is the Vote UKIP get Miliband mantra being pimped by Toby Young’s Unite The Right crusade. The key message of UTR is for UKIP to stand down in key marginals and not rock the boat in safer Conservative constituencies. The result? Cameron stays at No !0 and can then renege on another “cast iron guarantee” after producing some sort of fudged, face saving “agreement “ full of vague rhetoric and short on hard detail.
But young Tim is pushing forward on the other flank by saying all the great unwashed outside the metro media/cultural bubble are just being fed a false narrative of scare stories about issues like Immigration and the EU and, because they are outside the bubble they really aren’t sophisticated enough to grasp the real “facts”
Take immigration…
As you may have read today, migrants are more likely to pay taxes and less likely to take benefits than Brits.
There you are, says Tim. These are “facts” fresh from the “experts” so quit all this nonsense about immigrants being a burden on the state – it’s the Brits who are sucking at the teat.
But hang on a minute Tim. From whence do those figures come? Could they be, as Douglas Carswell suggests, a tad questionable?
The “experts” who make such claims have failed to look at all the evidence. Those who insist that migrants are less likely to claim benefits tend to draw their data from the Labour Force Survey, which relies on respondents reporting claims to benefits, rather than actual data on claims made.
Working from other sources, however, such as HMRC and ONS, quite a different picture emerges
There are nearly half a million migrants claiming working tax credit in the UK.
Migrants are at least 20% more likely to be claiming working tax credit than the rest of the population.
More migrants claim working tax credit than claim all of the main out-of-work benefits together.
Migrants form a much higher proportion of those claiming working tax credits than of those claiming any out-of work benefit
So maybe those UKIP “scare stories” are not just stories, Tim….just saying..
In fact it’s Tim who spreads the scare story.
A ban on immigration would mean higher taxes, lower spending and a higher deficit.
Now that is over egging the pudding, Tim. UKIP has never said ban all immigration. We just believe in Controlled Immigration where the main drivers are the skills sets required by the economy and the ability of our social infrastructure – housing stock, schools, healthcare etc – to absorb those numbers efficiently and effectively.
Now, Tim, just scribble about something else until the DT gets the next missive from Tory HQ
