Business Secretary Vince Cable brands David Cameron's migration target 'impractical' A day after Nick Clegg attacked George Osborne's call for another £12bn of welfare cuts between 2015-17, the Lib Dem Business Secretary warned that the Tories" target was "not sensible" because the Government could not control EU migration or the number of people choosing to leave the UK. He told a BBC2 documentary, The Truth About Immigration, to be screened tonight: "Setting an arbitrary cap is not helpful, it almost certainly won't achieve the below 100,000 level the Conservatives have set anyway, so let's be practical about it." Mr Cable has clashed repeatedly with Tory ministers over immigration. He is worried that the target risks damaging the economy by restricting the number of high skilled workers and students coming to Britain. The Tories insist that net migration has been cut by a third since 2010 and a party source said: "The public want the Government to control immigration. If the Liberal Democrats don't want to listen to the public, then they ought to drop the democrats part of their name. But Mr Cable received support from an unlikely source when Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, said he was right. Mr Farage dismissed the Tories" target as "laughable" because Britain had opened its doors to Romanians and Bulgarians who want to work in the country on 1 January. "You cannot run your own immigration policy if you are a member of the EU," he said. Mr Farage told BBC Radio 4 that migration to the UK should be cut even if it harmed the economy. "I do think the social side of this matters more than pure market economics," he said. The Ukip leader raised the stakes by calling for migrants to be banned from claiming benefits in the UK for five years - much longer than the three-month delay announced by David Cameron last month. Boris Johnson, the Mayor or London, proposed a two-year wait, showing that the Prime Minister remains under pressure on the issue inside his own party. Mr Johnson told LBC 97.3 radio: "We don't want to be slamming up the drawbridge being completely horrible to people. If you want to come and work here you can do that but there should be a period before which you can claim all benefits and it seems entirely reasonable to me that they should extend that to two years.