Economist Prof. Steve Fothergill has said he was “sacked” by Sheffield Hallam University after writing a paper that criticised U.K. immigration policy for allowing large numbers of jobs to be taken by foreigners. The Telegraph has the story.
Prof. Steve Fothergill said his contract was terminated by Sheffield Hallam University after his paper found that half of the jobs in former coal mining areas were taken up by migrants.
He alleged that bosses at the university told him they were unhappy with his paper and subsequently did not renew his short-term, part-time contract.
Prof. Fothergill accused Sheffield Hallam of launching an “assault on academic freedom”, alleging that the university “simply didn’t like the conclusions we came to”.
Sheffield Hallam University denied that there was “any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings”, adding that the academic was on secondment there.
Speaking to the Telegraph, Prof. Fothergill, an economist specialising in urban and regional development, said: “I was told there was an issue with the quality of the academic work, which is nonsense – the paper is a very thorough evaluation of the numbers.”
His paper, which explored employment growth in former mining areas in England and Wales in 2011-21, found that almost half the jobs created had been filled by foreign workers.
It concluded that given the substantial “effort, energy and funding” ploughed into these areas over the decade to regenerate local economies and communities, the outcome was a “poor rate of return”.
It suggested that the high numbers of jobs going to non-U.K. workers could explain why “vast numbers” of coalfield residents – 590,000 in the autumn of 2023 – were on out-of-work benefits.
The paper also suggested the need to “better regulate migration to the U.K., to bring down the numbers so that more of the benefits of local regeneration feed through to local residents”.
But the academic claimed that days after an article was published in October referencing the research, he was called into a meeting at the university’s Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research and told that the university was unhappy with the piece of work.
Prof. Fothergill claimed his short-term, part-time contract, which he said had been renewed consistently since 1992, was terminated.
He said he had run the study past half a dozen very senior academics around the country for their comments.
“These are leading professors, in Cambridge, Birmingham and Newcastle, whose views I respect. No one came back saying ‘Oh no Steve, you’ve got this wrong’,” he said. “They were all saying ‘Wow, this is rather shocking in terms of the numbers’.”
In a series of emails seen by the Telegraph, the Director of the university’s Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research said that while there was no suggestion “that the data are wrong or your conclusions cannot be substantiated”, the study had “not been presented in a way that is sufficiently robust academically to substantiate the policy conclusions it draws and the language that is used to propose them”.
It said the report “fails to engage critically with wider debates around migration” and uses language which is “at best a little careless and at worst will be seen as offensive or inflammatory”.
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