We need to talk about immigration
by Rakib Ehsan, spiked:
The failure to integrate record numbers of newcomers is a social catastrophe in the making.
Britain’s voters have very little to inspire them ahead of the looming General Election. The Conservatives look tired, rudderless and divided under the leadership of prime minister Rishi Sunak. And the alternative of a Labour government led by Keir Starmer is just as unappetising. Neither party seems capable of offering an uplifting vision of Britain’s future.
Nowhere is this dearth of political vision more apparent than on the overlapping questions of immigration, multiculturalism and integration. These will pose huge political, social and economic challenges for Britain in the coming years. Yet few among our political class are willing to properly grapple with these issues. Sunak’s posturing over ‘stopping the boats’ and his ill-fated Rwanda policy will do little to fix a migration and asylum system that is fundamentally broken. Labour would prefer to change the subject entirely.
But we can no longer avoid talking about immigration. New arrivals have reached unprecedented heights this decade. Net migration reached a peak of 745,000 in 2022 – with 1.2million people entering the UK in a single year. To put this into perspective, just 2.2million people migrated long-term to the UK during New Labour’s entire 13 years in power.
What’s more, immigration levels are expected to continue rising in the near future. The ONS issued a national population projection last month, predicting that nearly 14million people will move to the UK between 2021 and 2036. That is more than the present-day population of Greater London, Greater Manchester and Birmingham combined.
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