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In the wake of last week’s shocking net migration statistics and immigration levels, the Westminster village and attendant commentariat has completely flipped.
Not only was last year’s net migration of 606,000, announced in May, surpassed with the year to June reaching 672,000, but the number for 2022 was revised upwards to an astonishing 745,000. As Migration Watch UK founder Lord Green said in the House of Lords this week, over the past two years net migration has added up to about the population of Birmingham.
Until this point, the government (with a few exceptions, like Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch) had bizarrely been deluding itself with the notion that the public were unconcerned about the scale of legal migration. Can they really be so out of touch? Another explanation could be that they are only too aware of how people feel but don’t give a damn.
Indeed, this could be said of the bulk of the political class. Mr Sunak and most of his cabinet clearly thought they could pull the wool over the public’s eye again on legal immigration if they could claim progress on efforts to Stop the Boats. As we have written time and again in this newsletter, thinking their efforts to stop the illegal crossings would fool people into believing legal immigration would also be tackled was utter poppycock.
Can the bombshell net migration numbers really have taken the Government by surprise? Migration Watch UK warned again and again that it would happen. And yet, all we got from No 10 was contradictory messages. Take, for instance, the PM’s reaction to the numbers last Friday, when he was saying net migration was too high and should come down. By Monday, at an investment summit arranged at his behest, he was extolling the virtues of immigration routes that he himself had introduced. This strikes us as Pushmi-Pullyu immigration policy.
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. You can read the full version here.
Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every Friday as soon as it is released.