Philippe Legrain

The debate in the UK about whether to tax bank bonuses (Labour) or balance-sheets (Conservative) is a sideshow. Both are stopgap measures. The key issue is that banks need to be broken up on competition grounds so they don’t earn huge profits in the first place.

Read my article in The Guardian

The Guardian, 4 January 2011. Taxes on financial transactions, carbon and land could fill the hole in the public finances

I was interviewed by Peter Allen on 5 Live Drive on 23 November, following the government’s announcement of the details of its cap on highly skilled foreign workers. The recording isn’t great and I sound a bit breathless because I was on my mobile phone at the airport, rushing to catch a plane. Listen to […]

The UK government yesterday announced much tighter restrictions on people from outside the EU who want to come here to work or study. At at time when the government is relying on the private sector to drive the recovery as the public sector is cut back, and when the education sector is a particularly important […]

Ed West says he took time to reply to my earlier post because his “Chinese maid, Yen or Wen or whatever her name is, took ages to clean up my study” – delightful, isn’t he? He then deliberately misinterpreted my response – or perhaps he’s just stupid? I said it was nonsense to claim that […]

MigrationWatch have posted a pitifully weak response to my criticisms of their education “report”. 1) They defend their use of cumulative figures. They say it is legitimate because the “sole objective” of the study was to calculate “pupil place requirements stemming from net migration since 1998”. Really? If the sole aim was to calculate the […]

In a typically delightful post about Sally Bercow and the MigrationWatch libel threat, Ed West of the Daily Telegraph describes me as Philippe Legrain, author of How to Turn Europe into the Lebanon in Just One Ill-thought Out Step. Unlike Andrew Green of MigrationWatch, I don’t believe in trying to silence debate, so I’ll let this […]

Another day, another twisted use of statistics by MigrationWatch. Their shock report suggests the cost of schooling migrants’ children is astrononomical. They do this: 1) By using cumulative figures. If you add up spending on anything over a long period of time, it looks much bigger than it really is. Using a single year’s statistics, […]

This blog post also appears on the Battle of Ideas blog on the Independent’s website. I will be speaking about mobility about the Battle of Ideas in London on Saturday 30 October. I hope to see some of you there. Further, faster, cheaper, better – ever since the invention of the wheel, human progress can […]

On Tuesday, two Russian-born scientists at the University of Manchester won this year’s Nobel physics prize. The new immigration cap could have prevented them coming to Britain. Today, they and six other Nobel laureates warn that the immigration cap threatens the UK’s position as a centre of scientific excellence. It would “damage our ability to […]

George Osborne’s decision to axe child benefit for the richest 10% is clever politics. Does Labour want to defend welfare for the rich? At the expense of the poor?

This right wing think tank Migration Watch has conducted a study which has revealed that youth unemployment is down to migration which is obviously grossly simplistic. The main reason for youth unemployment is the recession which was caused by the bankers and the bankers are more responsible than the migrants, and it’s fairly dangerous propaganda […]

Martin Wolf writes in the FT: Some argue that we have no right to bequeath higher debt to future generations. But why would it be wise to bequeath a smaller economy to posterity, instead?

Please can we kill, once and for all, the lie that Barclays survived without government aid. It benefited from government guarantees, the bailout of its counterparties and deposit insurance.

The coalition government has taken leave of its senses. Highly skilled foreign workers are small in number, but make a disproportionate contribution to the economy – and government coffers. Global businesses that invest in the UK economy, boost exports and create jobs for British people rely on them. They also provide irreplaceable skills, experience and […]

Since the disaster in 1986, British charities have helped thousands of young people from affected areas in the Ukraine and Belarus to have holidays with British families. Now those charities say their work is becoming impossible as the UK Border Agency rejects so many visas at the last minute. Last month only seven of 17 […]

I debated whether freedom of movement is a good thing on BBC1’s Sunday Morning Live with George Hargreaves of the Christian Party and Jon Gaunt, a right-wing shock jock. Part 2

Max Dunbar reviews Aftershock in 3:AM magazine In his essential book Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, the economist Philippe Legrain demolished the case against migration in both its economic and what he kindly terms its ‘cultural’ form. In that book he also made the argument for freedom of movement of labour to match the freedom of movement of […]

I debated the issue with Douglas Murray on the Politics UK programme on the BBC World Service. The interviewer was Edward Stourton. Listen here.