British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer departs 10 Downing Street to attend PMQs (Image: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publis)
It is customary to equate levels of with the population of individual towns and cities. But so shocking are the latest migration figures that we are running out of cities to compare with the new arrivals.
Only London and Birmingham have more residents than the net 906,000 added to the UK population in the year to June 2023.
That migration came out a bit lower in the 12 months to June 2024, at 728,000, is no consolation. The estimate for 2023 has just been revised upwards by 20% – and the figure for 2024 may be, too, once the full data emerges.
Not all migration is bad, of course. Many migrants are contributing to our economy. They are staffing our hospitals and our care homes, which without them would be in an even bigger crisis than they are already. But Britain cannot go on absorbing nearly a million people a year. Where are they all supposed to live?
In the year to this June, just 192,530 new homes were completed in the UK. It is small wonder that house prices and rents are soaring – and how pathetic that the current government tries to blame the problem on a handful of second home-owners while ignoring the elephant of migration.
certainly isn’t going to help lower migration. Just look at the jump in illegal migrants piling into small boats to cross the channel since dropped the Rwanda scheme on his first day in office. But this week’s migration figures relate to before the election. They represent a Tory failure. The party talked tough but achieved exactly the opposite of what it promised.
To be fair to the new Conservative leader, , she recognises this. On Wednesday, she said “On behalf of the Conservative party, it is right that I as the new leader accept responsibility and say truthfully that we got this wrong.”
The first job for any leader whose party has just lost office is to understand why it was rejected. It is proving a struggle for , who still seems to think she lost the US presidential election because she only banged on about abortion and trans rights every five minutes rather than every two.
But Badenoch has passed the test. She understands the won dozens of red wall seats in 2019 because it promised to help working class voters who, not unreasonably, felt their wages were being suppressed by migrant workers.
Badenoch is also right to say that leaving the is no panacea. Yes, of course it is ridiculous and offensive that Albanian drug dealers have been allowed to use the “right to a family life” to escape deportation. The misuse of human rights needs urgently to be addressed.
But most of the 906,000 people who came to Britain in the year to June 2023 were not illegal migrants. To put the figures into context, 45,755 people arrived on small boats in 2022 and 29,437 in 2023. The vast majority of migrants are coming here, perfectly legally, to take up jobs, study at our universities or to join family members who are already here.
We are sucking in so many foreign workers because we have so many of our existing population sitting idle. The number of people on out-of-work benefits has surged from 3.65 million in 2018 to 5.79 million today. This is not because there are no jobs but because it has become far too easy for people to sign off on sickness benefits or otherwise avoid work.
If these people were working we would have far less need to scour the world to staff the , care homes and hospitality trade.
promised on Sunday to deal with the problem of welfare claimants “gaming the system”, but when the Government produced its white paper on welfare reform on Tuesday it flunked the issue. As leader of the opposition, Badenoch now has an opportunity to put right past failures and start to devise policies which will address migration on all fronts, legal as well as illegal.
She should start with a study trip to Sweden which until recently had as big a problem with migration as Britain but whose government in August announced that this year for the first time in 50 years it has experienced negative net migration. Moreover, the country has achieved this while remaining a member of the ECHR. To tackle unsustainable migration the UK is going to have to do what the Swedes did, and look at the problem from all angles, rapidly deporting illegal migrants and ensuring that it is getting the best out of its own workforce.
Starmer’s government is unlikely to make any headway, so the field is open for the to seize the initiative.