David Cameron's speech last Friday was just one more, in a long line of over-spun media stunts. His Conservative party has sacrificed more than a decade's worth of life chances for the people of this country on a cross of lies.
Simply summarising everything that is wrong with the immigration system in this country is not a solution; rather, the solution is to have an amicable divorce with the European Union and put in place a fair points based system. Only this will end the unfair discrimination between EU and non-EU migrants. Why must an Indian doctor, who is appropriately qualified and speaks English, face so many hurdles to come to work in Britain, while an equally qualified doctor from Slovakia does not? It is unfair and purely down to EU rules on internal free movement of labour.
These EU rules show us that what Cameron proposed is just hot air and that none of the measures will have any impact on EU migration, as there will still be complete freedom of movement within the EU. It is also clear from statements by Angela Merkel and President Junker that this is not going to change.
There are some in this country who claim that controlling immigration is a bad thing and that many services such as the NHS would collapse without foreign labour. I've long been dubious about these claims.
I was speaking to a friend of mine - Dr Jonathan Stanley, who is a Doctor in Scotland. I put these claims to him and he had this to say:
"The idea that our NHS would collapse without immigration is nonsense. Other countries which cannot rely on binge immigration from developing countries have sensible strategies on training and crucially; the retention of healthcare staff trained in their own country. Our government is cutting nurse training places while British nurses, tired of being overworked and undermined, head abroad for better prospects".
The thing that will really cause the NHS to collapse is economic mismanagement. We must not become a country like Japan, which went through a lost decade thanks to economic policies which kept it languishing in the doldrums.
For young people in Britain who have been failed by our education system, the expansion of the EU into Eastern Europe has brought a lost decade, with unstable employment, underemployment, zero hour contracts - all masked by employment figures that tell us everything's fine. It isn't. Instead what we see are SureStart centres closed while we send child benefit to thousands of children in Europe, A&Es close, schools struggling with capacity and GP surgeries are bursting at the seams.
This isn't going to change and we have never won powers back in forty years, so we must change our relationship with the EU. Outside the EU we will still be friends and neighbours; we'll just have our sovereignty back.