Immigration fuelled the biggest rise in the population in England and Wales for at least 75 years, the Office for National Statistics revealed today. The Telegraph has more.
The population rose by almost 610,000 to 60.9 million between mid-2022 and mid-2023, the biggest increase since 1949, when comparable records began.
The ONS said the growth was largely down to record levels of net migration, which stood at 622,000 for the year to mid-2023.
The impact of immigration was even more marked because of the negligible growth in the domestic population, owing to a declining birth rate and rising death rate as a result of the ageing population.
The number of births fell by 21,900 to 598,400, while the number of deaths rose by 24,000 to 598,000.
This meant the natural change in the population – the difference between births and deaths – dropped to 400, its lowest figure for 46 years.
The data follow figures released last week which showed a 34% cent fall in the number of foreign workers, dependents and students moving to the U.K. following a visa crackdown announced by Rishi Sunak last year to reduce net migration.
The figures, released by the Home Office, suggest the Government is on course to reduce immigration by 300,000 following measures including bans on foreign workers and students bringing dependents, increases in the skilled worker salary threshold from £26,200 to £38,700 and curbing shortage of occupation visa schemes.
Net migration currently stands at 685,000 for the year ending December 2023, down from a record high of 764,000 the previous year.
Labour is expected to continue with the legal migration measures introduced by the Conservatives although there is pressure for relaxation of visa controls from some within its ranks.
If you want to know why there’s a housing shortage, a crisis in public services and GDP per capita is failing to rise, look no further. The Tories did this, despite promising the complete opposite, and that’s why they lost.
Worth reading in full.
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Morons rule ! Unfortunately
“Today’s bonus prize question is: which other government is treating its people like fools when it comes to energy policy?”
They are fools – at least anyone who voted Labour in Australia on the basis of “cheap green energy” is a fool, and anyone in the UK who voted for any major party other than Reform expecting to have cheaper energy.
I’m sorely tempted to use Hitler as an exponent of a politically sound strategy here¹. :->
It’s of no use to call people who have been fooled fools. That’s just going alienate them and make them dig in their heels wrt insisting that they certainly weren’t fooled. The trick is to un-fool them gently, preferably without them noticing what’s going on, to make them change their minds.
¹ Because of his conviction that a political movement which meant to have any success cannot afford elitism but must have mass appeal, that is, must manage to appeal to masses of factory workers politically associated with SPD and KPD.
I’m not advocating calling them fools in so many words as a political strategy. Just pointing out the current reality. Maybe you should go into politics (not a sarky comment – the world needs logical people in politics).
I absolutely suck at handling people.
[Not proud of it because I tend to get bitten by this, but that’s how it happens to be.]
Perhaps a shadowy Peter Mandelson figure lurking in the background?
I don’t like being “handled” and prefer straightforward honesty, but I guess I am weird. In my experience, it’s actually not that hard to tell when someone is being honest rather than rude, but maybe that’s just me.
” Labour’s extraordinary loss of support to the SNP thanks to its litany of broken promises”
Not sure the SNP want to Drill Baby Drill. Rab.C.Nesbitt would do a better job than those boys.
“rush to Net Zero is not solving climate change”…..Why is there something wrong with it!
Theatre of the Absurd just runs and runs at venues throughout the newest and oldest continents. The largest continent of all just wants the cheapest possible energy to lift the other half of the continent out of poverty. Even despots know which side their bread is buttered on.
The second largest continent hangs in the balance. Luxury beliefs have a lot to answer for. If Governor Grewsom of California and the Dame from New York with the Hispanic name get their wicked way, it’ll be all beliefs for them and all no luxuries for you.
Grewsom and Dame best packed off to join chums Justin and Lucinda on a pristine Arctic island powered solely by breezes and sunbeams. What a foursome that would be. Good luck avoiding your turn on the emptying the privvy rota on cold and still, dark winter middays lasting for 4 months at a time. Have fun when Red Ed drops by for supper bearing frozen bacon butties. Bad luck, the microwave back-up battery ran out of charge months ago.
The most impoverished continent of all aspires to the energy riches whose largesse the oldest continent has taken for granted for over a century. Strictly fobidden on orders of the frosty foursome. Same goes for the proles back home. Our beliefs matter more than your energy prices.
A big unanswered question remains, who are the con-artist ventriloquists pulling these energy dummies’ strings? Along with the other big question of why did anybody ever fall for climate claptrap in the first place?
Answers on postcard please, sent back in plain English to the Club of Rome and the Jason Committee. Usual explicit two words should suffice.
The planet is perfectly capable of saving itself.
Latest from Whitney Webb….They’re rebranding the whole plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm7Ug42xhp8
These people won’t be around for much longer. Resistance to their evil is growing exponentially in two ways: understanding of the real nature of their agenda and the false science used to justify it and also people fighting back because it is becoming a matter of survival. Stuffed shirt bureaucrats will fade to nothing in the face of such undestanding and resistance. If you remember film of Ceausescu after he was deposed or any potentate once they are forced out. It is as if all power has gone from their demeanour they look like frightened husks. As Sun Tzu said. sit by the river long enough and you will see the heads of your enemies come floating by.
Rejecting the push from food distributors, a spokesman for Mr Bowen said experts had found that “unreliable coal generators are driving price spikes”.
It’s good to know that – 141 years after the invention of the steam turbine and after about century of all high-power applications on this planet being driven by steam turbines – ‘experts’ have finally discovered that they don’t really work. Or was this supposed to be a statement about some unreliable process for generating coal artificially? Maybe try mining instead. That works.
This guy is essentially spouting perfectly random nonsense by sticking words together whose meaning he obviously doesn’t understand. There is no such thing as a coal generator (unless they’re really trying to generate coal). Coal is burnt to heat water to turn it into steam which then drives steam turbines which are connected to alternators to generate electricity. Obviously, it doesn’t really matter how exactly the water is turned into steam, be it by burning coal, oil, gas or wood or some by nuclear reaction. Once the water has been turned into steam, the remaining process is principally identical.
The problem here is that crooked politicians get away with this kind of stuff, exactly as during COVID. They don’t even have to make sense when making up stuff. Mere flim-flam with technically sounding words and some mentioning of ‘experts’ is enough. Or so they believe.
Presumably these tame ‘experts’ did not say that Bowen’s government policy of sidelining the coal plants had reduced their operating hours and so the funding available to spend on their maintenance.
Trying to make sense of this gibberish is a mistake. That’s exactly what these ‘experts’ speculate on. They throw a few cheap words which mean nothing into the arena to distract from the issue at hand and other people then try come up with explanations what could have been meant by this instead of simply rejecting this out of hand and demanding that politicians actually talk sense instead of ominously waving their hands and whispering darkly about very important issues which aren’t ever actually named themselves.
It’s a safe bet that the sole reason this sentence contains an unreliable is to assert by implication that actually unreliable sources of energy, like wind, are really reliable, while actually reliable sources of energy, like coal, are really unreliable because people have been calling renewable unreliables already and hence, this must be politically defused by hijacking the catchy term and attaching it to the exact opposite of what it can sensibly apply to.
That’s same pattern also evident in cheap green energy: So-called green energy is anything but cheap, not the least because the state is willing to guarantee seriously inflated prices for it, and hence, whenever green energy is mentioned, cheap must somehow be attached to it to make people hope that the route through this valley of tears will eventually end if they put up with ever rising prices because of green energy for just a little longer. Just another two curves to flatten the week and then, it’ll all be over for good! Again and again and again and again.
Yes they gaslight us that the extremely efficient supermarkets are price gouging when its the cost of energy that is driving up prices, in production, transport and storage. They tells us they are addressing cost of living pressures by throwing our tax dollars around like confetti.
Why would britain have any concerns about what happens in australia with net zero when Rome is burning, right here at home?