Do our leaders have the courage to end mass immigration?

THE GERMAN election showed how important and unsettling the issue of immigration has been to voters in that country causing a massive protest vote. But growing disquiet across Europe and the world about how large populations might be resettled hasn't yet stopped Britain from pursuing a policy of high immigration.

- Guy Dampier

That's the obvious conclusion of the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, whose projections show that in the decade from 2022 to 2032, the population will increase by five million and it will all be from immigration.

That's because births and deaths are at the same level, effectively cancelling each other out, even taking into account the assumption that medical advances will extend life.

This is still probably an under-estimate. The ONS projections believe that while ten million migrants will come here by 2032, five million will return home. But since 2021, migration has shifted from people from Europe, who are more likely to go home, to people from Africa and Asia, who are not.

The ONS also assumes that net migration will decrease over the next few years, before settling at 340,000 a year on average from 2028 onwards. But this projection is calculated by looking at an average of the last ten years of net migration, so is likely an underestimate as after 2021, net immigration soared as high as 906,000 a year.

Even though it has since dropped, in the year ending June 2024 it was 728,000 double the level it reached before 2021.