British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's party is still trailing in the polls and 80 percent of Britons think his government is being dishonest about immigration, surveys showed yesterday.
A poll in the Sun newspaper showed the main opposition Conservatives at 40 percent, Brown's governing Labour Party at 35 percent and the Liberal Democrats at 13 percent.
The results would produce a hung parliament if replicated in a general election, Britain's biggest-selling daily said.
The Conservatives have been ahead for nearly a month after Brown, who took over from Tony Blair in June, decided against holding a snap early poll.
In a separate survey on whether the government had been honest about the true scale of immigration into Britain -- a topic which flared up last week -- 80 percent said it had not.
The government admitted on Tuesday to making mistakes regarding the number of foreign workers coming into the country, leaving Brown seeking to calm a simmering immigration row.
New figures also revealed that up to half of all newly-created jobs over the last decade of Labour government had gone to foreign-born nationals.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she was "sorry" the government had to correct official figures on the increase in foreign nationals working in Britain since 1997, from 800,000 to 1.1 million.
Then, citing a written answer to parliament dug up from July, the Conservatives said the figure was actually 1.5 million people.
The Sun's poll found 51 percent strongly disagreed that the government had been honest; 29 percent tended to disagree; 11 percent tended to agree and 3 percent strongly agreed.
Asked whether public services would cope with the influx, 49 percent said they were not at all confident; 33 percent said they were not very confident; 11 percent said they were fairly confident and 4 percent said they were very confident.
Overall, 48 percent agreed immigration was good for Britain, 36 percent disagreed and 13 percent said neither.
IPSOS-Mori interviewed 1,013 random adults by telephone on Wednesday and Thursday.
The subject is a regular hot topic in Britain, with critics branding the asylum and immigration system as "open-door" and "chaotic."
The Daily Telegraph newspaper said in a report published yesterday: "All of a sudden, immigration is just another political issue, like housing or schools. There is no longer anything risque about raising the subject. We want settlers to come here; but we also want to have a rough sense of whom we are admitting, and in what numbers."
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing