Politicians can’t spin mass immigration away

The new Office for National Statistics (ONS) numbers on net migration for 2024 were published on Thursday. The good news is that they were down (nothing to do with anything Keir Starmer’s government has done.) The bad news is that 431,000 is still horrendously high. These figures are another nail in the coffin of the idea that we are controlling immigration. 

The fact that the previous estimate for the year ending June 2024 was 728,000 but has now been revised to 739,000 just goes to show the poor methods we have for approximating the actual numbers. And who is to say that the 431,000 won’t be revised upwards in due course? 

The exponential increase of net migration over the past 30 years has possibly had the greatest impact on our way of life in the history of our country. It has affected everything: the  economy, our health service and housing, schools and higher education, transport, legal and political systems … I could go on but you get the picture. For years, we were told that higher immigration was, the better off we would be. Well, it seems this was all tosh. Relentless, rising immigration, far from making us richer has mostly had the opposite effect. 

This was the underlying reason for the Prime Minister to speak as he did when launching the government’s immigration White Paper on 12 May. Although, I dare say the drubbing he and Kemi Badenoch got from Nigel Farage in the local and mayoral elections on 1 May also had something to do with it. To which many reading this will say, “no sh** Sherlock.”

That’s the backdrop to the White Paper. To be fair to the ONS, they do their best. Fact is, any attempt to estimate migration figures entails making assumptions that can often be predicated on flawed or subjective assumptions and certainly not always on facts or empirical evidence. This is the nature of the beast.

While last week’s Immigration White Paper and the accompanying government sought to talk tough and allay public concern about the scale of immigration, a close examination of the Starmer-Cooper paper told a different story. And while Sir Keir Starmer’s apparent Damascene conversion to the immigration restrictionists’ cause, the ONS figures  should sound alarm bells.   You can’t just talk the issue away, Sir Keir. Blaming the obvious economic costs of mass migration on the last few years alone and heaping ordure on the Tories — even if some might argue they deserved it — was, I believe, a clumsy way of preparing us for continuing high migration levels, albeit lower than those of the recent past. But given that the British public want net migration to be in the low tens of thousands, net migration of over 430,000  simply can’t be justified. While the White Paper’s proposals were expected to reduce overall figures by just 100,000 a year, there’s no obvious way this will be achieved. Clearly, the government needs to go further and be more ambitious.

This modest drop in numbers is what makes me think our government has little appetite for the measures and changes that will halt the gallop towards a minority majority within the lifetime of most of the native British alive today. It’s easy to make a big show about the small boats crisis and the scale of illegal immigration, but when net migration is ten times the number crossing the Channel illegally in small boats, and the immigration inflow is 20 times greater, the measures proposed in the White Paper amount to no more than tinkering at the edges. 

Already our country is on course to see the native population become a minority in their own land. Net migration of 430,000 means we’ll get there a few years later; no wonder nearly half of us already feel like we’re living on an island of strangers. Well, that share of the population is only going to increase the longer the door remains open, pitifully controlled with anyone who makes it here by whatever means, legally or illegally, able to stay indefinitely here, if that is what they choose to do.  

In 2010, David Coleman, Emeritus Professor of Demography at the University of Oxford, wrote that with the then prevailing annual net migration migration levels (in 2009/10 it was around 200,000 while the fertility rate was higher than today) the native British would become a minority by 2066 — a thousand years after the  Norman conquest. There is no doubt that that deadline will be brought forward now — and when a country’s identity changes so drastically and so rapidly, there is no telling what might happen. 

We need limits and a threshold — a cap

This must be addressed, and quickly, and it can be done. We need limits and a threshold — a cap. No cap, no control — without imposing a limit on immigration, the entire policy becomes disjointed as each government department fights its corner demanding it be treated exceptionally. Business does the same as do the universities, members of parliament who fight for their constituents because that’s what MPs do. 

The Prime Minister’s “island of strangers” remark took courage. But does he have the will and the intestinal fortitude to bring in policies that will significantly reduce net migration?