Ukip is clearly taking the British debate about migration to a new level.

When its leader Nigel Farage claimed he missed a speaking engagement in Wales because of “too many immigrants on Britain’s motorways,” he was clearly making connections that many of us have missed.

I wait with bated breath for further revelations about al-Qaida’s responsibility for traffic cones and jihadist infiltration of Britain’s road maintenance programmes.

Perhaps, however, there is a need to widen the terms of political debate about “migration.” And it might be helpful if the major parties ceased to pretend there aren’t complicated issues to address.

So, if only in terms of European migration, there are over 2.2 million migrants that Britain needs a more honest conversation about — especially since some of the more popular caricatures about them turn out to be true.

Large numbers of these migrants do not even bother to learn the language, often living in tight clusters of “their own kind.”

Most think there should be no government restrictions on where they live and what they do.

Many are economically inactive. Others take jobs that might otherwise go to local people.

Whatever their status, most take more money out of Britain than they spend here.

So, it’s time for a more honest discussion. What Are We Going To Do About The Brits Abroad?

It is a picture that can be truly worrying.

A million British “migrants” have decamped to Spain — some with barely two sentences of Spanish to rub together. France and the Republic of Ireland now play host to over a third of a million Brits, settled within their lands.

Germany is the only other country to top the 100,000 figure for British migrants, but one glance at the map sees us scattered far and wide across the European landscape.

In or out of the EU, if Ukip gets its way on a right to send migrants back to where they came from, Britain will need a serious plan about where to put its own “return to sender” migrants if other countries take the same view.

This may not solve Farage’s motorway congestion problems, though he would doubtless be comforted to believe he was in a better class of traffic jam. But the real problems run far wider.

Even if you could “notionally” swap 2.2m of “ours” for 2.2m of “theirs,” there is bound to be a jobs/skills mismatch. What jobs would Britain need to fill? What skills would be needed? Which parts of the country would our returned migrants need to be sent to?

Of course, many “returned migrants” would find themselves in competition with those currently passed by in Britain’s jobs market. But for what jobs?

Social media sites are now being used as platforms for the “migrants take our jobs” appeal to young — and not so young — voters.

For those facing zero-hours contracts in zero-prospects jobs, this can be a powerful, and accessible, explanation of an economy that fails them on a much bigger scale.

Banking has become Britain’s new welfare state. In Britain, making money has long replaced the idea of making things. An economy that no longer presumes to produce for itself also loses interest in providing the skill base that tomorrow’s sustainable economy will rely on. That is why Britain faces a chronic skills shortage.

In most of our major towns and cities there is an easy way of testing this out. Try to get an emergency plumber or electrician to come out over the weekend to rescue you from some domestic mishap or other.

Odds are that the only ones you find will turn out to come from eastern Europe.

Colleges offering English language courses have waiting lists of migrants with construction industry skills, looking for a language base to underpin their trade.

The last economic crisis saw Britain rescuing the wrong sector of the economy.

Construction was thrown out of the window and the whole productive sector was told to stand outside the banks, hoping for loose change from the bonus payments being thrown at speculative traders.

If Britain had had the sense to stipulate that these bonuses should all come in the form of bonds that the banks had to buy from the Green Investment Bank, at least the GIB would have had money to put back into the real economy.

But we didn’t. So we end up with an economy seriously short of adequate skills and long-term job prospects.

But the “send ’em all back” movement isn’t really focused on a skills gap. Its focus is on visceral prejudice rather than economic reality.

Look at the jobs being done by migrants within the current British economy.

You soon discover that employment itself is brutally divided between the jobs we can’t do and the ones we won’t.

Travel on a night bus around London in the early hours of the morning. There are usually two groups of passengers.

In the first are those with luggage, heading off to an airport for an early flight abroad.

The second are those on pre-dawn shifts, doing the cleaning and serv icing work that keeps London’s “respectable” daytime economy going.

You can recognise this second group because they are either not British or not white.

Alternatively, venture to areas of Britain where food is produced, picked or processed.

You find a disproportionate number of migrant workers there too — squeezed into overcrowded accommodation, working long hours, in poor conditions, for poorer pay.

Then turn to the care homes and see who it is that wipes the backsides, cleans up after and cares for an increasingly ageing British population.

And finally, take a look at the early morning shifts of those who clean our inner-city streets after the night-time revellers have gone home.

None of this is the space Ukip ventures into. But once you’ve sent “them” all back, what exactly would Ukip’s marketing pitch be for the the jobs left behind?

It is hard to see young people rallying behind banners proclaiming: “This vomit is ours — the clean-up should be too,” or “British

spuds, picked only by British lads.”

And in a society that struggles to get British men to clean their toilets at home, I can’t see a queue forming to clean other people’s.

Up the skills ladder, the prospects don’t get much better. “Toothache? Any Brit with a drill,” “Lights fused: Britons only need apply,” “A gas leak: own spanners and UK passport required.”

Oh sure. I can see Britons from all walks of life queuing for opportunities such as this.

The reality is that the migration debate has become a “bread and circuses” distraction.

In it, the dispossessed scrap among themselves while the wealthy look on.

All debates about “austerity credentials” of the different political parties duck this colossal flaw in contemporary British politics.

The real starting point is solidarity, not citizenship.

When I had my first summer job, I remember asking my dad why I had to pay a NI contribution out of my wages.

He told me to see it as a gift rather than a tax. After the war, his generation agreed to this as a way of making sure my grandad’s generation could have a pension.

My contributions would make sure that, when it came to my dad’s turn to retire, there would be enough in the pot for him too. It was an act of solidarity from one generation to another.

Underpinning this was another commitment from him to me. It was to the jobs, education, skills and apprenticeships my generation would need if we were to be contributors to this pot until our turn came to draw upon it.

The last 30 years of laissez-faire British politics — which individualised presumptions about pensions and NI contributions — broke this bond between generations.

This was when we were redefined (individually) as consumers rather than (collectively) as citizens.

A new citizens’ movement is needed to reclaim this collective entitlement.

One starting point would be restoring the right to insert “local labour agreements” in public service contracts.

Britain seems to remain ideologically opposed to this, pretending that it breaches EU public procurement rules. Yet the private sector has been doing so for years, inserting “24-hour” response times for the supply of component parts or service/repair obligations.

Other EU states do so by other means, but the effect is the same. You have to have a local base — and a skill base — if you want the local contract.

Farage might actually approve of sticking two fingers up at the transnational in favour of the national.

But he would balk at the idea that many of the skills we need to draw on may currently be found within migrant communities rather than his own. This leaves him stuck in the congestion of his own prejudices.

It is not where Britain’s big economic debate should be. Political parties should be warned — racing to join an intellectual tailback with Ukip is just the road to nowhere.

Alan Simpson is former Labour MP for Nottingham South.