Leading Tory and Labour politicians rushed to announce punitive measures against immigrants yesterday in order to woo bigoted voters away from Ukip.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith announced in the Daily Mail that immigrants from the EU will lose all entitlement to housing benefit from April.

This is in addition to a new ban on claiming out-of-work benefits until they have been living in Britain for three months.

Labour shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves jumped on the bandwagon yesterday and demanded that jobseekers who fail basic English and maths tests should lose their benefits if they refuse to go on a training course.

Ms Reeves pledged that the next Labour government would introduce a basic skills test.

"This will ensure that all new jobseekers have an assessment of their basic maths, English and IT skills at the start of their jobseeker's claim," she said.

"Those who don't have the skills they need for a job will have to take up training alongside their jobsearch or lose their benefits."

Ms Reeves said it was "shocking" that nearly one in 10 people claiming jobseekers' allowance did not have basic English skills, and over one in 10 did not have basic maths.

Left MP Jeremy Corbyn warned that "we seem to be descending into a series of racist rants by Ukip and the Tories, and some bizarre concoction of social controls proposed by the Labour front bench."

Mr Corbyn emphasised: "The principle of the welfare state is to support people in times of potential destitution and hardship.

"Can't we just accept the principle that the welfare state is there for all of us at all times?"

The Islington North MP urged politicians to turn their attentions to "the real scroungers in our society, the wealthy tax-dodgers and corporate wheeler-dealers who keep their money in tax havens around the world."

Labour MP Michael Meacher described tax evasion of around £35 billion a year as "a colossal scandal on a scale 100 or 1,000 times greater than the issue of immigration benefits."

Public service union PCS accused Tory politicians of "shamefully using migrants as a political football to satisfy the more extreme reaches of their backbenches and Ukip."