RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Labour's 'new' migrant policy is just another ludicrous gimmick to divert attention from Starmer's failure... just read the small print

Just as well I’m not an immigrant, otherwise I’d be on the first plane out. Under Labour’s latest disingenuous gimmick, anyone coming to work in the UK will have to attain a command of English to A-level standard or face deportation.

That would rule me out from the off. I left school at 16 for a job as a cub reporter on a local rag. I’d passed English O-level (what we used to call GCSE in old money) but never advanced beyond that.

Fortunately, back then a lack of higher qualifications was no barrier to a career in journalism. We didn’t have graduate trainees in the early 1970s. Which was just as well. If you sat me down today in front of a modern English A-level paper, I’d almost certainly fail.

According to the latest pack of lies coming out of the Home Office, had I arrived here from overseas, that would be enough to have my visa revoked and sent packing.

All migrants will be expected to prove themselves capable of producing ‘clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects’ and speak ‘fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions’.

Most of the Cabinet would flunk that test. Politicians have enough trouble speaking in plain English, so why should we expect foreigners to bother?

Not that anyone should worry unduly. It ain’t gonna happen. Read the small print and it turns out that all migrants would be given up to five years to learn English to the required standard, by which time this Government will have gone the way of all flesh.

Plus, where are they going to learn the lingo for ‘social, academic and professional purposes’? There are bogus ‘English language’ schools and colleges everywhere – all of them heavily over-subscribed but, as the Mail revealed recently, sparsely attended, if at all. Most of them are just a front for illegal immigration.

This ludicrous proposal is just another knee-jerk reaction designed to divert attention from Labour’s complete failure to tackle the migration crisis. It is about as sincere as Home Secretary Pixie Balls-Cooper’s previous broken promise to put up Syrian refugees in her own home.

This ludicrous proposal is just another knee-jerk reaction designed to divert attention from Labour’s complete failure to tackle the migration crisis, Richard Littlejohn writes

Given that more than a million foreign immigrants are arriving every year - ignore the deliberately massaged ‘net’ figures, which discount hundreds of thousands of UK citizens getting out of Dodge for good - who is going to check that they will all be able to speak English to A-level standard in five years’ time? Nobody.

Never mind new arrivals, what about those already here who have made no effort to speak English? There are swathes of our inner cities where English is rarely if ever spoken – especially among older parents, grandparents, uncles, aunties, plus first and second cousins by marriage and in-laws, all granted permanent residency under ridiculously generous family reunification provisions.

Why else does every public body, from the DSS to local councils, publish information in more than 200 different languages, many of them scribble? The NHS alone spends more than £120million a year on interpreters and translators. Don’t expect that bill to fall any time soon.

That’s on top of the £1billion a year paid to migrants in benefits and the staggering £4million a day it costs taxpayers to billet ‘asylum seekers’ in Lenny Henry hotels.

That will amount to an astronomical £15billion over the ten years from 2019, when Boris Johnson’s Tories were elected to ‘take back control’.

Yes, the Conservatives reneged shamefully on every promise to cut immigration, and thoroughly deserve their near obliteration at the polls. But Labour has neither the policies, nor the inclination, to pull up the drawbridge.

Even if they had, Surkeir’s far-Left buddies in the yuman rites racket would put the kibbosh on it. Labour has no intention of withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, which allows virtually every illegal immigrant, convicted murderer, rapist, drug dealer, child molester, people smuggler and other assorted ne’er-do-wells to avoid deportation because of their inalienable right to a ‘family life’.

I certainly can’t see any immigration court judge agreeing to kick someone out because they can’t conjugate an irregular verb properly or tell a past participle from their elbow.

As for insisting that all migrants prove they have mastered English to A-level standard, dream on, baby.

Ninety per cent of the people born here couldn’t claim to do that. Me, included.