A couple of interesting developments out of the UK in recent days have suggested that a groundswell shift in attitudes towards Britain’s immigration situation is underway, with 56 percent of Britons telling a new poll that it is the most important issue facing the country.
With the crippling issues facing so many western countries – housing; cost-of-living; crumbling healthcare systems; the list goes on – it is always astonishing to me that so many people identify immigration as the number one issue they’d have their Government deal with.
But it is understandable.
Excessive levels of immigration, after all, affect at least two out of three of those aforementioned issues, as well as some other, equally important ones (law-and-order, for example). Which seems to be why Britons are not only acknowledging immigration as one of the country’s foremost concerns, but apparently advocating for previously unimaginable solutions.
As reported by The Sunday Times, “Nearly half of Britons want a moratorium on immigration and would support mass deportations of recently arrived migrants”:
“The findings show 45% of Britons say they would support ‘admitting no more new migrants and requiring large numbers of migrants who came to the UK in recent years to leave’.
“This has support among voters of all parties. It is backed by 86% of Reform UK voters but also sizeable minorities of Labour and Liberal Democrat voters at 27% each.”
Although the organisation that carried out the polling, YouGov, attempted to downplay the findings with the usual nuance and context, that the cat is out of the bag as far as this topic is concerned is undeniable – especially when establishment figures start publicly coming to terms with cold, hard data, as also happened this week.
Executive at the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), David Miles simply noted that immigration to the UK is resulting in “serious problems” for public services and living standards, pointing as he did so to projections that the UK is set to become the most populous country in Europe by mid-century.
To give some background to that prediction, just last week it was reported that immigration stands behind “the two biggest annual rises in the population of England and Wales since the Second World War”, per data drawn from the Office for National Statistics (ONS):
“The population grew by more than 700,000 in the year to June 2024 to nearly 62 million, the second largest annual increase since records began in 1949, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
“It was only beaten by the 821,210 increase in the population in the preceding 12 months, from mid-2022 to mid-2023, following record rises in net migration – the number of people entering the UK minus those leaving.”
An astonishing 98 percent of the population increase that year is now attributed to immigration, with “natural” change resulting from births and deaths hardly factoring in at all.
So if the background Mr Miles is working with is accurate, his diagnosis of the situation ought to be, too. And that is: the situation is simply unsustainable, and that faster population growth, far from alleviating fiscal problems, is only going to compound them.
He bases that view on the fact that, as admitted by the OBR, low-paid migrant workers cost the taxpayer far more than they contribute to the public purse. An analysis published last year showed that the average “low-earner” who arrives in Britain aged 25 costs the State an estimated “£150,000 each by the time they can claim the state pension at 66”. The OBR assumes low-paid migrants earn half the average wage, and finds they receive more from public services compared to their tax contribution.
The concrete manifestations of poor economic governance are often what result in real anger amongst otherwise complacent segments of a population, and in Britain, all the alarm bells that can be pulled to raise awareness of the fact that tougher times are coming – as a direct result of disastrous immigration policy – are currently being pulled.
These islands being linked as they are, for better or, more often, for worse, do not expect the dormancy that periodically descends upon this conversation in Ireland to last. As the temperature heats up in Britain, those sparks will likely find tinder here, and vice versa.