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The Office for National Statistics revealed that Britain’s population is growing at its fastest rate ever recorded. In the past year alone, 662,000 people were added to the country’s population. For the resident population, deaths outnumbered births—this hasn’t happened since 1976, aside from the pandemic-driven decline in 2020. In other words, the increase in population is not a result of natural growth but is driven entirely by migration. Net migration hit an astonishing 677,000 over the past year, a number that could well understate the reality. We’ll come back to this.
Earlier in the week, we also learned that the UK now hosts the largest population of illegal migrants (745,000) in Europe. In fact, these are 2017 figures and reflect the lower end of the respected Pew Research’s findings of 800,000 to 1.2 million illegal migrants in the UK seven years ago.
In 2018, we did our own analysis of illegal immigration to the UK with a breakdown of how migrants came to be living here without authority i.e. illegally. Working on Pew Research figures and what a number of senior officials had revealed about the likely number, our conservative assumption was that the illegal population of the UK was about a million people in 2017/18.
We also estimated 105,000 illegal migrants were coming each year (NB this was before the illegal Channel crossings got going and removals were much higher than they are now). We further calculated an annual average of 30,000 leaving voluntarily or being removed, leaving an annual net 70,000 being added to the illegal population. That being so and taking a working assumption of one million illegal immigrants here in 2017; the number of illegal migrants in the UK today is more likely to be 1.5 or more.
But back to legal immigration and population growth. Few weeks go by without our drawing attention to the calamitous (a word used advisedly) scale of immigration. Net migration of 600,000 (note it’s around 700k at the moment) means another 20 million people added to our population within the next 25 years). The latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) just make us at MW even more determined to shine a light on what is happening.
We are at a critical stage and urgent action cannot wait. Sir Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper must get their act together; the situation, and public, demand it. And yet, our 14-week-old (it seems much, much longer) Labour Government seems to want nothing to do with the issue of top public concern. They appear to be in total denial and refuse to address the problem. They have no strategy of their own and are content to keep in place failed Conservative policies (apart from the Rwanda scheme, which they were far too hasty to ditch). It isn’t just that the population explosion strikes at the heart of the country’s future sustainability and economic wellbeing, it is also about the social impact. Do read the article below under ‘article of the week’ by Rod Liddle, it includes this:
“And right now we are full to the brim — and likely to get fuller.
That will lead to more and more strife. Those riots we saw in the early summer might give you an indication of what is to come.
We need to be firm about this. For the good of our country. And for the good of those people who have come here in the last ten years, thinking, perhaps, that the UK might be a canny place to live in. Well, it was, once.
So here’s a solution. An immediate moratorium on immigration. No net inward migration for ten years, minimum. Until we have had the time to create the infrastructure to handle the number of people we have already.
This is not racist, or xenophobic. It is a common-sense reaction to an emergency. Because this is a dire emergency.”
Also, this clip from Rafe Heydel-Mankoo, our good friend at New Culture Forum (NCF):
The figures are spot on of course.
Let’s end this section with the wise words of our Executive Director. Our Mike, as we like to call him: “The challenges we face are too significant to ignore, and it is time for a national conversation that honestly confronts the role immigration has played in shaping the country’s present and future. Reducing the numbers isn’t about isolationism or shutting the door on the world. It’s about making sure that Britain remains a place where communities thrive, services function, and future generations can feel at home.” Hear, hear!
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every week as soon as it is released.