New Labour's metropolitan top brass doesn't live on council estates, and believes in a tolerant, leafy-suburb, Guardian-reading multiculturalism. Fine, but it might have the decency to check the impact its policies have had on the UK labour market. A curious feature of the Great Recession is that total employment has fallen surprisingly little relative to the sharpness of the declines in output recorded in the data. But we need to split total employment into UK-born and foreign-born employment. 

The numbers tell a disturbing tale. In the early years of New Labour, before the increase in taxes and a plethora of new regulations undermined incentives, the economy delivered strong employment growth. Given that the existing labour force was predominantly UK-born, it was logical that for almost a decade the number of extra jobs for the UK-born was much larger than those going to the foreign-born. In the third quarter of 2005 the number of UK-born people at work in our country topped out at just over 26 million, while the number of foreign-born people was slightly above 2.9 million. 

The subsequent pattern has been unprecedented and astonishing. When the downturn started at the end of 2007 UK-born employment was less than at the peak, if only marginally so. But foreign-born employment had soared. In little more than two years, it had jumped by about a quarter to 3.6 million. 

The Great Recession then knocked UK-born employment. It slumped from 25.9 million in the fourth quarter 2007 to 25.1 million in the second quarter 2009 and remains at about the same figure today. By contrast, foreign-born employment continued to rise, with hardly any interruption, throughout the Great Recession and now exceeds 4.1 million. 

The discrepancy has almost certainly been more extreme in places like Bradford West, with its high proportion of immigrants. According to a report in the Guardian (no less), many people in places like Bradford say they could not vote Labour, but also loathe Galloway. As he boarded his victory bus, "one young white man pelted him with eggs". Yes, the West Bradford by-election could be seen as protest-vote politics taken to its extreme. But, above all, it was a cry for help by people who feel abandoned by an aloof and distant political class.