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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, admitted this week that the last Labour government made serious mistakes over immigration, that’s after it was revealed that a decade of record breaking immigration has dramatically transformed this country. Well Liam Byrne was Minister of State for Borders and Immigration from 2006 to 2008 and he is now Shadow Pensions Secretary of course. He joins me now from Birmingham, a very good morning to you Mr Byrne. Now listening to Ed Miliband’s speech last week, was he actually apologising for the vast numbers, the net migration into this country over a decade or so or was he just apologising for the fact that he didn’t make them learn good English?

LIAM BYRNE: No, I think Ed was being pretty candid about some of the things that we got wrong. For example I was the Immigration Minister who introduced the points system from Australia and introduced much, much tougher border controls but that was quite late on in the day, that was 2006, 2007 and I think what Ed was reflecting on is there are some things that we should have done much faster, much sooner. He’s not resigning from the argument that immigration has made our country more interesting, stronger and richer economically. I’m talking to you here from Birmingham, we’re a very diverse city and actually our diversity is one of our great strengths but I was one of the politicians who said quite early on that when you’ve got movement of people that is too fast then sometimes that pace of change outstrips community’s capacity to integrate people.

DM: Okay, it’s a very basic question then, you mentioned Birmingham and it’s been equated that about two city’s worth, two Birmingham city’s worth of people entering the country and staying here over those ten years, about two million people, is that or is it not too many?

LB: Well I think for many communities the pace of change was a bit too fast and that’s why I was a big supporter of things like the points system and it’s also why Ed Miliband was saying, look, when we welcome newcomers here there have got to be some important parts of the deal if you like and one of the things that Ed was underlining this week was the real need to speak English. I’ve had this debate in the City and across the UK, I think people in Britain are actually very welcoming but they do insist on some rules of the game. They want people to work hard and pay tax, they want people to obey British law and they want people to learn English and make an effort to integrate and the thrust of government policy, if you like, should be set up to support those basic instincts which are right.

DM: Just to be clear, was it too many? We all know Gordon Brown said British jobs for British workers, it turns out that many of these migrants too those jobs, more than the domestic population. Was two million too many, in retrospect should it have been fewer?

LB: Well look, from my point of view, an MP in diverse Birmingham, what I felt was that the pace of change was too fast for our community in our part in Birmingham to deal with that change successfully and you saw it for example in pressure on public services, you saw it in the way in which people responded to newcomers coming in and so that’s why I feel that you do need tough controls at the border, I thought the points system was the right thing to do but alongside that I think you’ve got to put in place a battery of changes that really help newcomers integrate because as I say, people in Britain are actually quite welcoming but they do want to see some rules of the game enforced and that’s what Ed Miliband was underlining today, with a real emphasis if you like on learning English because unless we speak a common language how can we live together as good neighbours?

DM: But instead of being euphemistic on this, it’s a simple yes or no, was two million too many? If they all had very good English would that have been okay then?

LB: No, as I say, from my point of view as an MP in Birmingham representing a community where unemployment is still high, I felt the pace of change was too fast.

DM: Okay, very clear. Now let’s move on then, I mentioned employment and now in your new role as Shadow Work and Pensions, you must welcome the continuing fall in unemployment and the increase in employment, given the economic circumstances. Wouldn’t you say the government is doing quite well?

LB: Well the headline fall that we saw last week is very, very welcome and I think what it shows is that families around Britain are busting a gut now to do anything and everything to get into work. A lot of people right now can’t get the hours they want and we can see now real pressure on pay packets so earnings growth fell to about 1.3% and that’s about half the rate that prices are going up so a lot of families up and down Britain right now, Christmas is going to be really, really tight. The things that really worried me though is that the momentum has really come out of jobs growth so we saw fewer jobs created in this last quarter than at any point over the last year and in about a third of England we actually saw unemployment go up not down. Then of course long term unemployment is resolutely stuck at just under a million. What that tells us is that the government’s Back to Work programme which was much feted, much heralded, called the Work Programme, is making absolutely no difference whatsoever. Now I’m worried about that because of course it puts long term pressure on the dole bill and buried away in the Chancellor’s figures on budget day was this fact – the increase in unemployment benefit projected by the independent Office of Public Responsibility is now set to rise by an eye-watering £6 billion. Now to pay down that price, the government is launching an attack on the very strivers and battlers that the Prime Minister promised to protect in his conference speech and they are now going to see a whopping great cut to their tax credits over the next few years. At a time when pay packets are under pressure, that is really bad news.

DM: I have a lot of questions on that but we haven’t got time to ask them. Mr Byrne, thank you very much indeed, Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary there, Liam Byrne.

LB: Thank you.