Labour: Tough on immigration, tough on the causes of immigration

The Labour Party have responded to concern about the rise of the BNP (expressed by Frank Field and Gary Younge amongst others) with a press release entitled "Newcomers must earn the right to stay in the UK":

"The public overwhelmingly supports the idea of newcomers earning their right to stay. Today we show how we'll make these ideas law, hand in hand with our new points system for selective migration, like the one that's worked so well in Australia."

That would be a points system as previously advocated by the EDP and UKIP would it?

For once though this is a joined up approach to government from New Labour. Not only will immigrants have to earn the right to abode, they - both political refugees and economic migrants - will be discouraged from coming here in the first place by a skilfully engineered downturn in the economy and an erosion of civil liberties to match the totalitarianism of the third world that they traditionally fled from.