In the Leave campaign, the central theme, the one that gripped the bellies of voters and ultimately led to the triumph of divorce from the EU: With Brexit, we will reduce the number of immigrants coming to the United States. United kingdom. This statement was repeated in propaganda before the 2016 referendum as an incantation. But since then, for the country, from this point of view, things have gotten worse and worse.
Figures released today by Britain’s Office for National Statistics are a major embarrassment to Rishi Sunak’s conservative government: total immigration for 2022 was 606,000, up 20% from the previous high of 504,000 last year. In all, 1.2 million people moved to the UK in 2022 and 557,000 people immigrated. This means that immigration added roughly the equivalent of a city the size of Glasgow to the country’s population last year.
These numbers are more than double the level recorded in 2019, when the Conservative Party, led by Boris Johnson, pledged in its election manifesto to reduce overall immigration. The data is particularly embarrassing not only for Prime Minister Sunak, but also for his foreign secretary for home, hard Brexit and anti-migrant fight Suela Braverman. The average pre-Brexit net migration was between 200,000 and 250,000 annually. Braverman said last year that she wanted to bring the total immigration down to “tens of thousands”. Sunak previously made good on a pledge made by Boris Johnson in 2019 to reduce the total to below 245,000. In fact, things are going quite differently, despite the intense pressure that the government wants.
The Conservatives’ string of failed promises on this issue began more than a decade ago. In 2010, during the campaign leading up to his election as Prime Minister, David Cameron promised to reduce net immigration to “tens of thousands”. At that time, the number was about 250,000 people per year. Cameron repeated his promise the following year, when he was already in office as prime minister, stating that the goal of reducing net immigration to less than 100,000 units would be achieved by the 2015 elections. That being held, net immigration reached a record high of 379,000 people. During the election campaign that year, the Conservatives reaffirmed their pledge, saying they had “fulfilled our ambition of annual net immigration in the tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands”.
Back then, it was Johnson, Nigel Farage and the Leave the Vote campaign supporters who promised to take back control of borders and immigration, and Theresa May did the same in 2017. The latest, unfulfilled, promise is exactly that of the last election campaign of 2019, which led Johnson’s victory, when the Conservatives promised to reduce the total rate of net immigration from the current level of 245,000 units. Today’s real data is about three times higher.
“Infuriatingly humble social media ninja. Devoted travel junkie. Student. Avid internet lover.”
