Mr McEldowney’s rejection (October 8) of Labour’s open-door immigration policy is futile when even senior Labour politicians have admitted so-called mistakes were made, while Ed Milliband said Labour was not sufficiently alive to people’s concerns and got the numbers wrong.

The most frank admission comes from Andrew Neather, former Downing Street insider and speech writer for Tony Blair who said: “Labour’s relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to open up the UK to mass migration which Labour was reluctant to publicise for fear of alienating its core working class vote.

The policy was intended to rub the right’s nose in diversity and make the UK truly multicultural.”

Lesser Labour mortals, such as MP Simon Danczuk, said: “We can’t win a General Election on a single issue, even if that single issue is the NHS, we have to talk about immigration.”

Labour boasts they embarked on a huge programme of new schools and hospitals but, crucially, they used PFI contracts which were poorly negotiated and have become like an albatross around the neck of our public sector. Payment of the PFI contracts is now wreaking havoc on public services and will continue to do so for many years to come and, to add to the UK’s woes, we are now being pursued by various East European governments for millions of pounds in benefits for their nationals who became unemployed when the projects ended.

The additional public servants Labour claimed to have appointed were required in an attempt to shore up services to cater for the exploding population numbers as much as to improve services.

Mr McEldowney repeats claims that more than 93% of immigrants are working and paying more in taxes than they receive in benefits.

I suspect he may be relying on a research paper published by the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration and its much-publicised, headline finding which claimed that recent EU migrants made a positive contribution of £22 billion.

The assumptions on which the claim is based, however, render the research worthless. For instance, it assumed the same employment level, average earnings, tax paid, accumulated savings, pensions and property ownership as for the average British citizen. The assumptions are untenable since many East European immigrants came here fleeing poverty, unemployment and appalling living conditions and very many work in low-paid, unskilled or semi-skilled jobs which are more likely to result in claims for in-work benefits than payment of tax.

Another finding, relegated to the back of the research paper was of a negative fiscal outcome for the period 1995 to 2011 for all immigration, which calculated a massive net cost to the UK of £96 billion.

Marie Howard Bromsgrove