Listen to it here.

By Tim Finch of IPPR. Excellent. Read it here.

Click here to read the article. Sorry for the poor quality of the scan.

In case you're wondering, I'm the one (very jetlagged) in the photo on the right.

The New York Times reports that:

Opponents of immigration tend to assume that people want to move from poor countries to rich ones irrespective of the economic circumstances - perhaps to languish on welfare, for instance.

This is nonsense, of course. Most people who uproot themselves to another country do so in order to better themselves by working hard.

When there are jobs to be filled, they come. When there aren't, they don't.

There is an interesting article in The Times about Brits who had been living in Spain returning home because of the economic crisis.

Tellingly, though, they are referred to as "expats" throughout.

It seems that British people abroad aren't migrants, or worse still immigrants.

That's a term we reserve for nasty foreigners.

I'm in New Zealand for 2 weeks speaking about the economic benefits of diversity at a series of events in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch.

NZ is small country that will always be geographically remote, but it is intimately connected to the rest of the world through its wonderfully diverse people.

Their diversity is an often undervalued asset, especially in these difficult times.

Yet just as ethnic Chinese networks have long been at the centre of trade in Asia, Chinese New Zealanders can help New Zealand connect with China and the rest of Asia's dynamic markets.

What's more, New Zealand's diverse workforce can boost creativity, innovation and enterprise, and thus boost productivity growth. That makes everyone richer and helps pay for the schools, hospitals and other things we cherish.

To any NZ-based readers on this blog, I look forward to meeting some of you over the next weeks.

Christopher Caldwell is an intelligent and educated man. His columns for the FT are often perceptive and original. But his views on immigration in Europe, presented in his new book, "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West", are paranoid and delusional.

Caldwell's book is a cocktail of projected fears: Europe is in decline, its population ageing and falling, its citizens decadent and weak; immigrants are a threat, Islam an even bigger one, and Muslim immigrants are multiplying like rabbits; ergo, Muslim immigrants are a united force bent on conquering a continent that has lost the will and the means to fight. I simplify, but only a little.

Caldwell's book tells us more about Caldwell himself than it does about immigration in Europe. But sadly, it will get huge play, because it plays to the prejudices of all sorts of people.

Read a full review of Caldwell's book in the FT by Mark Mazower here.

Three, perhaps 4, boats laden with migrants people heading from Libya to Italy sink. As many as 300 people could be dead.

Europe's border controls claim more lives. The official response? We need tougher controls.

Citizenship has no meaning if different classes of citizens are treated differently, whether through multicultural policies or through racism.

Read the full article in the Sunday Times.

Our biggest domestic menace never was waiting outside Home Depot, hoping to clean your basement. Unauthorized immigrants are not about to destroy anything, not even when they get angry and loud and march in large groups. On the contrary, they are inspiring. Their ethic of self-reliance and hard work is one that Americans should recognize and celebrate.

Exhibit A: Riverside, Calif., where I went recently to watch immigrant advocates march against the Border Patrol.

Read the full article in the New York Times

As more Americans lose their jobs, the U.S. government is actively discouraging the recruitment of foreign workers, from dude ranchers and fruit pickers to lifeguards and computer programmers. Full article in WSJ.

In the NYT, Casey Mulligan points out how that preventing foreigners working to save American jobs is as absurd as the "marriage bars" which proliferated during the Great Depression. These prevented married women getting jobs, or led to women being fired when they got married. But since then, as the share of women working has soared, the share of men working has remained unchanged.

There isn't a fixed number of jobs to go around. Women don't take men's jobs, and immigrants don't take local workers'. Full article here.

Today, globalisation is neither uniform nor universal. It will always be incomplete. Clearly, then, it is also reversible. Read my new article for McKinsey here

Ha-Joon Chang's suggestion that the world needs a dose of protectionism to tide it through the global recession is utterly misguided. Read my new article for Prospect here.

After the Omnibus Appropriations Bill signed into law by President Obama scrapped a pilot programme that allowed a small number of Mexican trucking companies to carry cargoes north of the border - as NAFTA requires - Mexico has responded by slapping tariffs of up to 45% on 90 American agricultural and industrial imports.

Renault is to move production of its new Clio from Slovenia back to France, after President Sarkozy granted a bail out to French carmakers on condition they repatriate production from central and eastern Europe. Renault insists the decision is a commercial, rather than a political, one. So much for the EU single market.

I'm writing a new book, on the future of globalisation. It will look at the risks to globalisation from the ongoing crisis (such as protectionism, nationalism and political extremism) and ask what needs to change in the global economy - and what shouldn't. As with my previous books, this will involve a combination of first-hand reporting, economic and political analysis, and reasoned argument.

As part of my research, I am reading a lot, talking to lots of people, and travelling around the world. I'd be really grateful if you could suggest papers I should read, people I should talk to, and places I should visit. I'm particularly interested in hearing about people that the mainstream media often neglects.

You may be able to point me to a small business in China whose exports have evaporated and whose migrant workers are going home, or to one that is prospering by taking on a new line of work.

You may know Icelandic people who can relate how their lives have been turned upside down by the financial collapse.

You may have connections to communities in Australia that until recently were booming by exporting to China, and drawing in lots of foreign workers as a result; how are they coping?

You may know Mexicans who have gone home from the US, or Poles who have left the UK or Ireland, because of the recession.

And amid all the gloom and despair, what new opportunities are emerging that could help build a better and fairer global economy?

Or something else entirely.

Please email me on mail AT philippelegrain DOT com

I'll get back to you if I think there could be a fit.

Thank you very much.

Jenny Abura on the benefits of migrants' remittances to Uganda

Remittances to Latin America are falling Ecuador, which receives most of its remittances from recession-hit Spain, suffered a 22% fall in the last three months of 2008.

Finland's former finance minister on the need to protect the world's poor from the consequences of falling remittances

Hispanic immigrants who work in construction, hotels and other blue-collar jobs have suffered from the brutal economic climate. But immigrant gardeners appear to be weathering the harsh conditions well.

"Gardening isn't like working at a factory, where you depend on one employer," says Manuel Quezada, a 54-year-old veteran gardener, as he and his team put down sod in the front yard of a house here. "If I lose one house, it doesn't hurt that much."

The full article is in the Wall Street Journal.

I was interviewed on Frost over the World on 20 February. They won't be making a film about the interview, but it was a great opportunity to meet a living icon.

Very kind review by Michael Englard in the Observer:

Legrain's book makes a timely case for the benefits of migration and crisply counters the views of its prominent critics

Legrain is able to communicate complex ideas through impressively chiselled prose.

Thanks

A vessel overladen with migrants, near the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Photo by Mashid Mohadjerin/ Reporters, from the World Press Photo Awards.

 
(Andrew Brownbill/EPA)

The Australian Prime Minister accused arsonists of “mass murder” today as the death toll from savage bushfires sweeping parts of the country reached 131.

What on earth motivates people to start fires like that? It's horrific.

First they went after the gypsies... and now the vile Berlusconi government is trying to crack down on immigrants more generally.

Under a proposed new law, doctors would be able to snitch on illegal immigrants they treat, while foreigners who fail to leave Italy after receiving a deportation order could be imprisoned for up to 4 years, reports El Pais.

During his various terms in office, Berlusconi has pushed through all manner of legal reforms to protect himself against potential criminal proceedings. Opinions may differ as to who belongs in jail. I couldn't possibly comment.

With the X-word currently dominating the headlines, there could be no better time for this intelligent, wholly persuasive defensive of immigration. Scourging the xenophobia that sprouts at times of economic downturn, Legrain insists that clamping down on immigration is "morally wrong, economically stupid and politically unsustainable".

He points out that immigrants, who usually only wish to work abroad temporarily, make their host nation "more interesting and culturally rich". Legrain might have added that they bring a wonderful variety of culinary riches. As JK Galbraith said of immigration, "What is the perversity in the human soul that causes people to resist so obvious a good?"

Link here. Thank you.

What do you get when you mix inhumanity with bureaucratic targets? Immigration raids that make up the numbers by rounding up the easiest targets rather than the most dangerous fugitives.

The New York Times reports that:

Meanwhile, America's border wall is proving to be another fiasco, the Wall St Journal reports:

Texas state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh gets it right:

Free movement of labour makes economic and moral sense. Without it the EU would unravel
Read my article in today's Guardian

As the era of the dark side recedes a little, my sense of the looming reality is as follows. The men who ordered a man tied to a chair, doused in water, and chilled to hypothermia so intense he had to be rushed to emergency medical care, the men who presided over at least two dozen and at most a hundred prisoners tortured to death, the men who ordered an American servicewoman to smear fake menstrual blood over a Muslim's face in order to win a war against Jihadism, the men who ordered innocents stripped naked, sexually abused, terrified by dogs, or cast into darkness with no possibility of a future, and did all this in the name of the Constitution of the United States, the men who gave the signal in wartime that there were no limits to what could be done to prisoners of war and reaped a whirlwind of abuse and torture that will haunt American service members for decades: these men will earn the judgment of history. It will be brutal.

Andrew Sullivan on the end of the Bush years.

Speaking on Five Live Breakfast News this morning, with Andrew Green of MigrationWatch. Listen here

Britain's banks aren't lending, which is strangling the economy. The package of measures to support lending to smaller businesses which the government announced yesterday will do some good. But it is not enough.

As I have argued previously, the government should direct nationalised Northern Rock to step into the breach. Anatole Kaletsky endorses this position in today's Times:

the quickest and least costly emergency response would be to reverse the policy of running down Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. Both these banks are now fully owned by the Government and could be turned into rapidly growing state-guaranteed lenders.

The plans to run down their lending were right in the circumstances in which they were nationalised last year, when other private banks were functioning more or less normally. But things have completely changed and it now makes sense to reverse their policy of credit contraction. Northern Rock is ideally positioned to re-expand the supply of mortgages to first-time buyers, while Bradford & Bingley could revive the flow of finance to commercial and social housing. The Government could also be much less shy about exerting its majority control over the Royal Bank of Scotland and its 40 per cent stake in Lloyds-HBOS, by far the biggest commercial and mortgage lender in the country.

The updated and revised paperback edition of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them will be published in the English-speaking world outside the US on 5 February.

It is available for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk here.

Thank you to everyone who visits this website for your support.

UK foreign secretary David Miliband has written an excellent piece in today's Guardian about why the notion of a 'war on terror' is inaccurate and harmful. He argues that:

The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common. Terrorist groups need to be tackled at root, interdicting flows of weapons and finance, exposing the shallowness of their claims, channelling their followers into democratic politics.

The "war on terror" also implied that the correct response was primarily military. But as General Petraeus said to me and others in Iraq, the coalition there could not kill its way out of the problems of insurgency and civil strife.

He concludes:

We must respond to terrorism by championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, for it is the cornerstone of the democratic society. We must uphold our commitments to human rights and civil liberties at home and abroad. That is surely the lesson of Guantánamo and it is why we welcome President-elect Obama's commitment to close it.

In Britain, the government is today publishing its long-awaited citizenship, immigration and borders bill. It proposes that prospective citizens should have to "earn" British citizenship after going through a probationary period. I have written a critique of the earned-citizenship proposals here.

I debated whether Britain still needs immigration in a recession of Radio Five Live this morning, with Andrew Green of MigrationWatch. The audio clip will be posted once it is available on the BBC website.

In France, immigration minister Brice Hortefeux has been replaced by Eric Besson, an ex-Socialist who quit Segolene Royal's presidential campaign last year to support Nicolas Sarkozy.

Simon Jenkins on Britain's illiberal and senseless drugs policy:

Leaving ecstasy in class A on the grounds that "there is no such thing as a safe dose" is public stupidity. On this basis there is no safe alcoholic drink or cigarette. There is no safe tree, no safe ladder and, according to Smith, no safe mobile phone. Do we ban trees, ladders and mobiles? Lurking behind them all is an accident waiting to happen, a terrorist incident, a loss of state control. Smith's nostrum may be music to the health and safety industry, but not to common sense.

The British government wants to create a database that would keep track of everyone's calls, emails, texts and internet use.

Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, who has firsthand experience of working with intelligence and law enforcement agencies, told the Guardian:

The tendency of the state to seek ever more powers of surveillance over its citizens may be driven by protective zeal. But the notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile. We must avoid surrendering our freedom as autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make judgments that are compatible with our status as free people.

Maintaining the capacity to intercept suspicious communications was critical in an increasingly complex world, he said.

It is a process which can save lives and bring criminals to justice. But no other country is considering such a drastic step. This database would be an unimaginable hell-house of personal private information... It would be a complete readout of every citizen's life in the most intimate and demeaning detail. No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls.

The government's proposals must be resisted at all costs.

Joan Miró, one of my favourite artists, died on Christmas Day 25 years ago.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Are immigrants taking our jobs? It is an explosive issue, especially with Britain sinking into recession and unemployment rising. So opponents of immigration will doubtless seize on a new report by Migrationwatch which claims that those dastardly foreigners who have the cheek to look after our granny or pick English strawberries are stealing jobs from British people. Yet Migrationwatch’s claims are flatly contradicted by figures from the Office of National Statistics.

Migrationwatch claims that nearly all the jobs created in the UK since 2001 have gone to immigrants. But figures from the Labour Force Survey show that employment among British-born people actually rose by 378,000 between the second quarter of 2001 and the second quarter of 2008, the dates arbitrarily chosen by Migrationwatch. If one excludes the recent fall in employment due to the financial crisis and instead compares the last three months of 2000 with the last three months of 2007, the number of UK-born people with jobs has risen by just over half a million (520,000).

Migrationwatch also claims that employment among UK-born people has fallen by 230,000 since the second quarter of 2004, when Britain opened its labour market to the Poles and other eastern Europeans joining the EU. But this too is contradicted by ONS figures. These show that the number of British-born people in jobs actually rose by 43,000 between the second quarter of 2004 and the same period of 2008. Excluding the impact of the financial crisis, employment rose by 175,000 between the second quarter of 2004 and the last three months of 2007.

Migrationwatch say that “there has been no progress at all in getting British-born unemployed workers into work” since 2001 and blame immigrants for this. But ONS figures suggest otherwise. They show that the employment rate among British-born people – the proportion of UK-born people of working age in employment – rose sharply in Labour’s first term, from 73.5% in the second quarter of 1997 to 76% in the third quarter of 2000. Since then it has remained roughly steady: it was 75.6% in the second quarter of 2004 when Britain opened up to east European workers and 76% in the last quarter of 2007. In other words, the employment rate stopped improving well before eastern European migrants started arriving in large numbers, and has not worsened since.

The bigger point is this. As even Migrationwatch are forced to concede, there is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy. Immigrants don’t just take jobs, they also create them, as they spend their wages and in complementary lines of work. If Britain threw out its Polish workers, there wouldn’t suddenly be more jobs for British people – just as throwing women out of work wouldn’t provide more jobs for men.

Whatever way you look at it, immigrants are not taking British people’s jobs. On the contrary, they are helping to provide vital public services and keeping small businesses going. Not for the first time, Migrationwatch’s xenophobic prejudice is causing it to twist the truth. Andrew Green should be ashamed of himself.

I never thought I'd say this, but here goes: Boris Johnson is right.

Right to support an amnesty for the hundreds of thousand of illegal migrants in London and the rest of the UK. The reality is that most work hard, pay their taxes and contribute to Britain's economy and society, but they are forced to live in the shadows, bereft of rights, vulnerable to exploitation, and living in perpetual fear of deportation. Many have been here over a decade; some have British-born children growing up here. Just imagine the consequences of trying to uproot them.

The government's policy: talk tough, "crack down" on illegal immigrants, and deport those they can is a sham policy: it is economically, politically, logistically and humanely impossible for the police to round up half-a-million people and expel them from Britain. Since the government's policy is a phoney policy, it causes suffering, fragments the economy and society, and yet fails to achieve its aim.

Far better, irrespective of what you think about immigrants in generally, to face up to reality and regularise their situation. It worked for the US in 1986. It worked for Spain in 2006. It's likely to happen under an Obama presidency. And it will one day have to happen in Britain too once lily-livered short-sighted politicians finally realise that it is the only viable option. So why not do it now?

In recent years, Western governments have voiced concerns about Asian governments' vast sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) investing in Western companies. Some called this "investment protectionism"

But as Western banks faced collapse, they were delighted to receive capital injections from Asian SWFs - and Western governments didn't object. In a crisis, needs must.

Now, though, Asia's SWFs are having second thoughts.

China Investment Corp, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, will no longer risk investing in western financial institutions because of concerns about their viability and a lack of consistency in their governments’ policies, according to its chairman.

“Right now we don’t have the courage to invest in financial institutions because we don’t know what problems we will put ourselves into,” Lou Jiwei said.

Perhaps Western governments will realise that the only thing worse than receiving investment from Asia's sovereign-wealth funds is being denied it.

For years, the US has lectured China on how it should run its economy. Now, the tables are turned.

US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson went to Beijing to urge the Chinese government not to let its currency weaken.

The Chinese hit back in style. Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the Chinese central bank, urged the US to rebalance its economy.

“Over-consumption and a high reliance on credit is the cause of the US financial crisis,” he said. “As the largest and most important economy in the world, the US should take the initiative to adjust its policies, raise its savings ratio appropriately and reduce its trade and fiscal deficits.”

The balance of power in the world economy is shifting faster than most people realise.

Now, the United States tried a fiscal stimulus in early 2008; both the Bush administration and congressional Democrats touted it as a plan to "jump-start" the economy. The actual results were, however, disappointing, for two reasons. First, the stimulus was too small, accounting for only about 1 percent of GDP. The next one should be much bigger, say, as much as 4 percent of GDP. Second, most of the money in the first package took the form of tax rebates, many of which were saved rather than spent. The next plan should focus on sustaining and expanding government spending—sustaining it by providing aid to state and local governments, expanding it with spending on roads, bridges, and other forms of infrastructure.

The usual objection to public spending as a form of economic stimulus is that it takes too long to get going—that by the time the boost to demand arrives, the slump is over. That doesn't seem to be a major worry now, however: it's very hard to see any quick economic recovery, unless some unexpected new bubble arises to replace the housing bubble. (A headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion captured the problem perfectly: "Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In.") As long as public spending is pushed along with reasonable speed, it should arrive in plenty of time to help—and it has two great advantages over tax breaks. On one side, the money would actually be spent; on the other, something of value (e.g., bridges that don't fall down) would be created.

In short, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman says a fiscal stimulus needs to:
1. be big (unlike in the UK, where it amounts to only 1% of GDP)
2. prioritise government spending rather than tax breaks (unlike in the UK, where it consists mainly of a temporary VAT cut).

The Chancellor told the Observer that:

You'd be very foolish indeed to say, "Well, that's the job done". You know this is something that needs constant attention. We've got the Budget next year, we've got the pre-Budget report in 12 months' time, the Budget after that. I put more money into the reserve on Monday precisely because I know we're almost certainly going to be doing additional things. The people expect you to do that.

If he expects to have to deliver a further stimulus next March, he should have done it now.

A German doctor whose family was twice denied permanent residency in Australia because of his son’s Down syndrome has been allowed to stay after the immigration minister intervened on his behalf.

Dr. Bernhard Moeller moved to Australia with his wife and three children nearly three years ago when he was hired to work as a specialist at a rural hospital in the southern state of Victoria.

The family decided to apply for permanent residency, but were appalled when their application was rejected this month because Dr. Moeller’s 13-year-old son, Lukas, has Down syndrome.

Australia has a longstanding policy of weighing medical conditions in its residency decisions. Any applicant deemed to have a condition that would incur significant costs to the state-run health care system must be rejected under Australia’s immigration laws.

The Moellers appealed the ruling to the Migration Review Tribunal, the immigration department’s appellate court, but it upheld the decision. As a final resort, the family took the case to the federal immigration minister, Sen. Chris Evans.

Do you think the Moellers would have been allowed to stay if John Howard was still in power?

Full story in the NYT

Damian Green and I don't see eye to eye on immigration, but I find his arrest, questioning and the search of his home and office by counter-terrorism police outrageous.

According to the BBC, police suspect the Conservative immigration spokesman of “conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office” and “aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office”, basically making public information leaked from the Home Office. But as Willem Buiter rightly says:

Using the counter-terror unit to investigate an alleged offence which, even if it had been committed, would not be terrorism-related, is an abuse of power. These are the methods used commonly in police states. They have no place in the UK.

(A) All domestic non-financial enterprises that currently have access to bank financing and whose loans, overdraft facilities, credit lines or whatever other financial arrangements expire during the coming year, have the right to an automatic one-year extension of the expiring arrangements on the same financial and non-financial terms as the expiring arrangements. This mandatory ‘creditor standstill’ helps existing borrowers by providing them with a breathing space. It does, however, do nothing for new enterprises or enterprises that are not currently borrowing.

(B) Aggregate lending targets for lending to the domestic non-financial business sector are set by the government for each bank (last year’s total plus five percent, say). The banks themselves can decide who to lend to and on what terms. Any shortfall of actual lending from the target is translated pound for pound into a Deficient Lending Tax. Since not meeting the target amounts to throwing money away, the banks will lend.

(C) Nationalise the banks (paying as little as possible to the existing shareholders), fire the existing management and board of directors, and have the government appoint a new executive and a new board that are serious about meeting lending targets. With 100 percent share ownership by the state, there is no risk of lawsuits about the executive or board of the  bank not meeting their fiduciary duty to the shareholders. Full state ownership would make transparent and formal what is already true in substance: but for the financial support of the government (past, current and promised/anticipated in the future), there would no longer be more than at most a handful of viable cross-border banks in the north-Atlantic region.

He concludes:

Things are critical. Unless the banks start lending in normal volumes very soon, this recession could indeed become another Great Depression. We cannot wait for the banks to find their juju. The government may have to take it to them.

Full post here

The reason why the government had to rescue Britain’s banks is not that their shareholders and executives deserve special favours, but because businesses and jobs depend on the availability of credit. There is no public interest in propping up banks that won’t lend.

For sure, banks should not be lending with reckless abandon as they did in the go-go years, but nor should they be slashing the overdrafts of solvent small businesses and jacking up the interest rates on them. If the banks refuse to lend, the government must step in. It is considering all sorts of interventions, but seems to be ignoring an obvious solution.

Political pressure on the banks has been largely ineffective so far. While Peter Mandelson, the business secretary, has said that “It’s completely unacceptable to the government and to business in this country for banks indefinitely to stop functioning as banks. We are in very intensive discussions with the banks, believe me”, jawboning alone is unlikely to succeed when banks’ priority is hoarding cash and reducing risk.

Alasdair Darling is also drafting a raft of measures to support business lending. These could include new requirements for banks to give businesses greater notice of changes in the terms and availability of credit. More ambitiously, the Chancellor is looking at ways to extend government guarantees to support new business lending.

But such is banks’ aversion to lend that the government also needs to consider bolder moves. It could insure all loans to businesses. It could lend directly to companies. And it could nationalise the banks altogether.

There is also another option that the government does not appear to be considering. It already owns a fully fledged bank: Northern Rock. Perversely, while it is urging the soon-to-be part-nationalised banks to lend more, it is busy shrinking the balance sheet of the only fully nationalised one.

That made some sense when the rest of the banking sector was private: the government did not wish a state-owned bank to undermine the private banks by competing unfairly them. But now that the whole banking sector enjoys an implicit government guarantee and the overriding priority is supporting lending to avert a depression, that objection no longer holds.

So if other banks will not lend, the government should inject a dollop of new capital into Northern Rock and direct it to make it more credit available on reasonable commercial terms. If other banks do not follow suit, Northern Rock may grow to become one of the biggest banks in Britain. But so what? It can be privatised again, no doubt at a hefty profit for taxpayers, when the crisis is over and the economy is growing again.

Addendum: Northern Rock is raising its mortgage rates today. Unbelievable.

The private financial sector has to deleverage massively, but would (with credit markets and wholesale financial markets closed for business) do so in an unnecessarily destructive way if left to its own devices. The household sectors in the US, the UK and a number of other European countries have to deleverage (start saving seriously) on a significant scale. Left to its own devices, the short-run Keynesian aggregate demand fall-out from a necessary reconstruction of household financial wealth could be disastrous. So the public sector has to leverage up (borrow) at the same time the household sector is forced to deleverage.

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Alasdair Darling’s statement was a pre-budget report only in name; in reality, it was an emergency budget crafted by Gordon Brown. It was big and bold, but it should have been bigger and bolder. Worse, the main plank of the government’s plan to support the economy – a cut in VAT to stimulate consumption – is misconceived.

On the big picture, Gordon Brown is right and David Cameron wrong: a fiscal stimulus is urgently needed to prop up the economy as demand slumps. Faced with the sharpest downturn since the 1930s, interest-rate cuts are not enough. While a further increase in government borrowing is risky, doing nothing – and risking an even longer and deeper recession – would be reckless. The forecasts for government borrowing are huge – £78 billion in this tax year, £118 billion in the next – but national debt will still peak at only 57% of GDP, comfortably below the level deemed prudent by EU rules. It is not a tragedy if public debt rises even higher in the short term. So the Conservatives’ critique is wide of the mark. The real problem with the government’s stimulus package is that it is too small and poorly targeted.

A stimulus of £20 billion between now and April 2010 is not trifling, but it amounts to only 1% of GDP. It will do little to fill the gap left by the collapse in private consumption and investment, not least since some of the stimulus will be saved. In comparison, president-elect Obama’s team are considering a fiscal boost of $500 billion, or even $700 billion, over two years – which is equivalent to 1.75%-2.5% of GDP in each year. A bigger stimulus would not only provide a bigger boost to the economy directly, it could also help restore confidence, by signalling to consumers and companies that the government is serious about supporting the economy.

The focus of the emergency budget is also misdirected. Encouraging overindebted consumers to spend more is wrong-headed. For a start it may not work: since retailers’ hefty discounts are doing little to tempt shoppers to spend, a cut in VAT of 2.5% is unlikely to either. But even if it does work, encouraging consumers to go on yet another spending spree is unwise when they need to start saving more. The government should instead have done far more to limit job losses, repossessions and bankruptcies and to invest in areas, such as infrastructure, that bring long-term benefits to society.

For sure, the measures to help small businesses are welcome. A combination of tax cuts and loan guarantees will help. But a large share of the assistance consists of merely deferring a planned rise in corporation tax; a temporary cut would have been much better.

Likewise, the £1.3 billion package to protect jobs is too small. More jobs could be saved if the government introduced a temporary cut in employers’ national insurance contributions. And while the £1.8 billion housing package is better than nothing, three months’ grace for those struggling with their mortgages will bring little relief. The government should also provide funds for housing associations or local authorities to buy up property that banks wish to repossess, allowing homeowners to remain as tenants if they wish.

Above all, the focus of the stimulus package should have been a big increase in investment in infrastructure and other public works, along the lines proposed by president-elect Obama. Instead, the government merely brought forward £3 billion in capital spending, a drop in the ocean. It should be doing much more: bringing forward and increasing spending on social housing, upping and accelerating investment in Britain’s crumbling infrastructure, especially transport, and offering bigger subsidies for energy-efficiency measures, such as loft insulation.

Longer term, the government’s growth and deficit forecasts look optimistic. It seems unlikely that the economy will start growing again as early as the second half of next year. The recovery is also likely to be slower than the government predicts, since consumers will be struggling with the burden of their excessive debts for many years. So looking forward, the taxes are likely to have to rise by more in the next parliament than the 0.5% increase in national-insurance contributions and the introduction of a new 45% tax band on incomes above £150,000 announced now.

The measures announced in the pre-budget report are unlikely to be the last word. As the crisis continues to take violent and unpredictable new turns every other week – witness the rescue of the US banking giant Citigroup over the weekend – further action will no doubt be needed soon. The government may need to inject further capital into Britain’s ailing banks – and more outright nationalisations may even be necessary. A further fiscal stimulus is also likely to be needed in next year’s budget. It’s a pity it wasn’t announced this week.

at the Royal Geographical Society with Khalid Koser and Andrew Green, chaired by Jonty Bloom.

Watch it here

Immigration to Britain from eastern Europe continues to fall.

In the third quarter of 2007, 59,000 people from the A8 countries registered to work in Britain; in the same period this year, only 38,000 did. The decline was mostly due to fewer Poles applying to work: their numbers almost halved from 41,000 to 23,000.

We shall miss them when they are gone.

Many are filling vital gaps in our public services. In the twelve months to September, 3,400 A8 nationals registered as care workers, 840 as teachers, researchers and classroom assistants, 75 as dental practitioners (including hygienists and dental nurses), and 835 as GPs, hospital doctors, nurses and medical specialists.

Read the latest Home Office Accession Monitoring Report in full here.