The economy shrinks quarter by quarter; whole streets of houses in northern towns are abandoned, schools start closing for want of pupils – but there is no shortage of jobs for those who want to work, and traffic on the M25 seems a bit easier. That is a vision of Britain without migration. The headline to the latest population estimates from the Office of National Statistics – which cover the year to the middle of 2023 – is that the number of people living in the United Kingdom swelled by what is a record for modern times. The population grew by 1 per cent, adding an extra 662,400 people – more than the population of Manchester.
You have to dig deeper into the figures to realise that all of this growth is down to migration. The population already resident in Britain actually shrank last year by 16,300 – deaths exceeded births. What’s more, the natural fall in population was concentrated in Scotland and Wales. While England saw slightly more births than deaths (9,000), Wales saw 9,500 more deaths than births and Scotland a remarkable 19,100 more deaths than births (65,100 of the former and 46,000 of the latter). Without migration – international as well as from other parts of the UK – the population of Scotland would have fallen by 0.34 per cent.
Though many might like to imagine Welsh and Scots fleeing from their respective high-tax devolved governments, Wales gained a net 17,600 people from other parts of the UK and Scotland a net 13,900. It is England from which people seem to be fleeing – it lost a net 31,400 people to internal migration. While estate agents in Berwick on Tweed are reported to be enjoying a boost from well-off Scots looking to relocate south of the border, it is only the well-off who pay more tax in Scotland. For everyone else, a life in Scotland means lower-cost housing and more extravagant public services, courtesy of the Barnett formula.
The big story from the population figures is that those who voted Brexit in the hope that it would bring down migration have been comprehensively cheated – Britain’s new freedom to make its own migration policy has led to exactly the opposite: a doubling of net migration. It is changing the demographics of Britain faster than at any time since 1945. While many people will shrug their shoulders, or even welcome the new arrivals, mass migration has the power to change some communities very fast. The effect across the country is extremely uneven, which is why middle-class liberals tend to be bewildered by the strong anti-migrant feelings in communities in which new arrivals are concentrated. It should not really be a surprise that support for the anti-migration Reform UK has surged over the last year, and risen again since the election.
The subtext is that a sizeable chunk of this international migration is absolutely necessary to prevent the working population from shrinking. While many people might welcome a shrinking population, the reality would be unlikely to please them, because the population would be rapidly ageing as well as shrinking. The burden of supporting a growing elderly population of Baby Boomers would be severely felt as the working-age population fell sharply.
That is the complex reality of the politics of migration. In many ways migration is out of control – certainly of the illegal variety (which accounts only around a tenth of the total). But we would really be feeling it if net migration was brought down to a negligible level. Neither current policy nor the crackdown promised by Reform UK seems quite appropriate.
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