We don’t need more migrants – we need to stop Britain’s brightest and best going overseas
IF last week’s record immigration number of 504,000 for the year to June came as a shock, brace yourselves for another.
The real figure is twice as high. More than a million foreign nationals — 1,064,000 — settled in the UK during that same time, up 435,000 on the previous 12 months.
And this excludes the tens of thousands arriving illegally in small boats.
So what happened?
Well, the Office for National Statistics uses an accountancy trick to blur the gobsmacking one million figure — a city the size of Glasgow — by subtracting the 560,000 citizens who packed up and left the UK.
The “net” result reveals a catastrophic and accelerating brain drain.
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But emigration and immigration are exactly opposite things.
Emigration is costing Britain some of our brightest and best, mostly young, well-qualified adults including doctors and nurses . . . the very skills we are having to hire migrants to replace.
Many will never return.
But it is the explosion of inbound immigration — legal and illegal — which threatens to destroy this Tory government and blow the national political consensus to smithereens.
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Rishi Sunak risks antagonising millions of Red Wall voters who handed Boris Johnson his record 80-seat landslide three years ago in return for a promise to crack down on immigration.
That promise evaporated on contact with reality. Instead, voters watched visas being dished out by the million while boatloads of young Albanian men were “rescued” by our Border Force and escorted to seaside hotels, where homeless Brits were kicked out to make room.
Ministers have no idea what to do with them, how to stop them or how to send the blighters back.
Now MPs facing election wipeout are threatening a breakaway group of Northern Tories.
Keir has no answers
Others are being wooed by Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform Party, now running at 20 per cent in the polls.
One northern Tory MP warns: “Small boats is an existential issue for many of us and it’s about making sure government pays attention.”
The PM says immigration is now his top priority and Downing Street last night signalled action within days.
Rishi Sunak needs to prove he means business, ASAP.
Labour opportunists are waking up to the crisis they caused in 2008 by opening the floodgates to cheap foreign labour at the expense of British workers.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown set out — in the words of bragging No10 aide Andrew Neather — to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”.
Ex-BBC boss Greg Dyke similarly described the Corporation back then as “hideously white”. That problem, at least, has been sorted.
But in the process, Blair and Brown rubbed the noses of traditional working-class Labour voters in it too, resulting in the 2019 Boris landslide.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer calls Sunak “weak” for failing to stop an armada of rubber dinghies crammed with Albanian illegals.
But he has no answers of his own and no support from Labour lefties who want an open borders free-for-all which has already changed the face of the nation. The fact is, we don’t need any more migrants.
We can’t house all the newcomers. Public services — especially schools and the NHS — are groaning under pressure of numbers.
One in seven, or ten million, of the UK population were born abroad.
In London, it’s one in three. Almost 60 per cent of births are to mothers from overseas.
British-Bangladeshi Dr Rakib Ehsan, an expert in social cohesion, says: “It’s economically illiterate to argue that we need more migrants.
“Britain needs a boost. But flooding the employment market with cheap and often unregulated labour from overseas is not the way to administer it.
Explosive, woke era
“We have to develop skills and expertise in our existing population, rather than constantly plugging the gaps with imported labour.”
In this explosive, woke era of knee-bending culture wars, it is impossible to untangle a cat’s cradle of colours, races or religions without arousing screams of “racism”.
Rishi could double his ratings if he took the pro-immigration lobby head on, but don’t hold your breath.
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As for Keir Starmer’s Labour, Whatsisname’s Lib Dems or Nicola Sturgeon’s tartan terrors, you can abandon all hope.
It’s time to call for the evangelising populist previously known as Ukip’s Nigel Farage.