Originally Posted by UKIP Press Office

For Immediate Release – 13:30hrs 22nd April 2005

What will an immigration points system achieve without a quota?

U.K. Independence Party leader Roger Knapman MEP today asked what Labour ‘hoped to achieve by introducing a points system for immigrants if there is no quota?’

Mr Knapman said that either the government would effectively set a quota by requiring a minimum number of points, or it would have no minimum restrictions making the points system ‘a pointless waste of time and money’.

He said that Labour had already stated that it saw ‘no obvious upper limit’ to the number of immigrants which the UK could take, and said that he suspected that their conversion to a points system was ‘designed to give the appearance of doing something whilst in reality leaving the system unchanged.’

“Labour are rightly rattled by public unease caused by their failure to tackle immigration issues over the last 8 years, but their decision to ‘talk tough’ is nothing more than window dressing.

“Mr Blair has consistently failed to heed warnings about the scale of immigration, and indeed nothing he has proposed will affect in any way the influx of immigration from the eastern EU states. Neither Labour nor the Tories can do nothing about EU immigration, having already ceded that right to Brussels.

“Ahead of enlargement, the government estimated 13,000 Eastern EU immigrants in the first year, and insisted that anyone who questioned this figure was alarmist, racist or ‘rabble-rousing’. Between May and December last year, the figure was 133,000.” ENDS
Notes to Editors:
For further information, please contact:
Roger Knapman MEP, UKIP Leader,
Mark Croucher, UKIP Press Office, 0207-222-9365 or 07960-584161