After the flood

Immigration figures released today by the ONS, showing net migration fell to 171,000 in 2025, are going to be weaponised by politicians that want nothing more than to keep Britain locked into a mass migration straitjacket. 

The Home Secretary is telling us that Labour is “restoring order and control”. The party’s backbenchers, given the scale of this drop, are now urging an abandonment of her lukewarm ILR reforms. Journalists are crawling over one another to find hyperboles that convey the sheer scale of Mahmood’s achievements, reminding us that Britain once endured net migration of 944,000. The PR blitz of today has one clear message: the immigration crisis is resolved. The country is saved. We will have peace in our time. 

So incomprehensible in size was the Boriswave, so daunting are those graphs, that voters will understandably cling to anything that resembles a lifeboat — even if it may prove to be little more than driftwood.

But, much as we would like to, we cannot pretend the last Conservative government did not happen. We must not ignore the flooding simply because the monsoonal downpour has ended and been replaced with a slightly gentler torrent. 

The Home Office awarded over 750,000 long term entry visas in the year ending March 2026, most of these were from outside Europe. That equates to roughly 14,000 new arrivals every week, dwarfing the number of small boat crossings that dominate so much of the media’s attention. The bigger problem is Heathrow not Manston. 

Of these hundreds of thousands of visas, roughly 80% were given to people whose primary purpose for migrating was something other than to work. 

The student visa bonanza, baked into Department for Education orthodoxy by the Conservative Party, has continued at pace, with over 400,000 visas awarded on this route. 

There is a growing tendency, amongst those who know little about migration, to insist that student visas should not be included in these figures as they are “non-basic net migration”. This was an argument invented by Theresa May and now continued with vim by low-grade bloggers. 

The student visa, in its current form, is little more than an ante-room to long-term migration, with over 10,000 foreign students claiming asylum last year. In-country visa routes opened by the Tories, including the graduate and care visas, allow students to easily remain in the country in low-wage, low-skill jobs long after they’ve finished their degree in circus arts or marxism (genuine course studies by foreign students in recent years). 

There has been an explosion in non-Europeans being awarded extension visas, from just over 100,000 in 2016, to north of one million in 2025. The care visa, offering discounted visa fees and no requirement to pay into the NHS, has accounted for a large part of this increase.

Labour’s apparent migration success is nothing more than an accounting trick, achieved through the inappropriate use of net migration figures, and its decision to deploy a hostile environment, not against illegal migrants, but ambitious young Brits who feel forced to flee their own country. 

There was a 60% increase in the emigration of British nationals between 2019 and 2025, with a quarter of a million Brits now annually seeking refuge in places like Australia, Europe and the United States. A clear indication that people are, surprisingly, not in favour of endless tax rises and rampant lawlessness. 

To include these persecuted souls, as the ONS does, in its headline migration figure is to use a travesty to mask an abomination. The simple fact is that net migration is not a useful metric for the conversation that Britain needs to be having. If the debate were simply about numbers, and the ability of existing infrastructure to cope, then its use would be appropriate. 

But the concern of voters has never been purely one of arithmetic. It is about the changing face of our country, and its descent from a stable, homogenous society into a patchwork of people that increasingly resembles an ill-governed Habsburg polity. 

The ONS estimates that, in June 2024, there were over thirteen million people resident in Britain who were not born here. One in five people on this island are definitionally migrants. Many of course, are now just as British as you and me, having been awarded a passport — often after as little as six years. Almost a quarter of a million people became British in 2025, with the simple flick of an administrative switch. 

A further half a million people were granted settled status, giving them full access to the welfare state, the health service, and the ability to bring over family members. The majority of these were under the protections of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, and Theresa May’s disastrous EUSS, which was hoisted onto our country whilst we debated the ins and outs of aubergine regulatory alignment. 

The only legitimate and appropriate course correction that the Boriswave should have provoked is a sustained period of net negative migration, with hundreds of thousands more foreign nationals leaving the country than entering. Today’s figures show the Labour government has ignored this option in the hope that a population so bruised by migration betrayals will not notice if it is done at a slightly slower pace