Vince Cable steps up attack on migration policy The UK debate around immigration intensified on Tuesday as Vince Cable, the business secretary, ridiculed Conservative attempts to cap net migration, while Nigel Farage of the anti-immigration UK Independence party said the social consequences of migration were more important than its economic effects. Mr Cable, a Liberal Democrat, warned that the 100,000 migration target was "impractical" and would not be met in time for the next election. He has continuously railed against his coalition partners" drive to control immigration and only last month compared Tory rhetoric on the issue with Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech. But on a BBC documentary to be aired on Tuesday, he will undermine the Tories further by predicting that they will fail in their pledge to bring net migration down to the "tens of thousands" by 2015. Setting an arbitrary cap is not helpful. It almost certainly won't achieve the below 100,000 level the Conservatives have set, so let's be practical about it," Mr Cable will tell the BBC. The idea it should come down to 100,000 is something the Liberal Democrats have never signed up to because we simply regard it as impractical. The business secretary will add that the cap was unworkable because net migration depends on factors beyond ministers" control, such as British people emigrating, free movement within the EU and British nationals returning from living overseas. Despite early signs that Theresa May, home secretary, was succeeding in her efforts to reduce net migration from its peak of 252,000, the decline is now flattening. The most recent statistics show the figure has increased from 163,000 to 182,000, following a surge of economic migrants arriving from crisis-hit EU countries including Spain, Italy and Greece. Mr Farage believes that Britain should leave the EU in order to take full control of its border policies. He said on Tuesday that the social consequences of immigration were more important than the overall economic impact of foreign workers. "If you said to me: "Would you want to see over the next 10 years a further 5m people come into Britain and if that happened we'd all be slightly richer?," I would say: "Actually, do you know what: I'd rather we weren't slightly richer and I'd rather we had communities that felt more united and I'd rather have a situation where young unemployed British people had a realistic chance of getting a job,"" Mr Farage told the BBC's Today programme. "So yes, I do think the social side of this matters more than pure market economics," he said. However, the Ukip leader admitted that he would encourage temporary workers coming to Britain to do specific jobs. "Let's be flexible on work permits; let's recognise that we do have some skills shortages in the British economy, which is very much a failure I'm afraid to say of our education system," he said. "But in terms of immigration, in terms of people coming to settle, I would suggest that for up to a five-year period we don't have people coming to settle until we sort out the mess," Mr Farage added. Separately it has emerged that three-quarters of the British public back cuts to immigration, according to a British Social Attitudes survey. Almost half of the poll respondents said they thought immigration was bad for the economy, while 56 per cent said they supported much tighter restrictions on newcomers.