Mass migration isn't Britain's lifeblood. It's an economic disaster

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a day ago

Within hours of stepping up as Reform chairman on Tuesday, David Bull triggered his first media controversy by remarking that 'immigration is the lifeblood of this country – it always has been'.
As popular as this sentiment is with Britain's politicians, it isn't true today and it certainly wasn't in the past. From 1066 through to the end of the Second World War, the population of Britain has been marked by relative stability. As a crude illustration, as late as 1951 the total non-White population of Great Britain was estimated at about 30,000 people, or about 0.07pc of the population.
Today it's roughly 20pc, and on course to pass 50pc by the end of the century. In other words, the population changes induced by migration over the past seven decades are essentially without parallel in 1,000 years of British history.
Even within this modern period, however, it's not quite right to say that migration has been Britain's lifeblood. It would be more accurate to say it's been the default policy of a state that keeps repeating its mistakes.
A brief summary of the last 70 years might fairly cast British migration policy as a mixture of blunders, unintended consequences, and myopic pursuit of short-term objectives, right from the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948.
As other writers have pointed out, while the narrative promoted today is 'you called and we came', internal government communications show that efforts were made to dissuade Caribbean migration in ways that wouldn't imperil the precarious bonds with Britain's colonies.
Shortly after the ship's arrival, Britain adopted a sweeping nationality act that permitted anyone with a passport issued by the British government to enter the country. This act, while 'never intended to sanction a mass migration', combined with policies aimed at attracting workers in specific fields to create a mass inflow.
Now, where have we heard that before?
Then, as now, policy revolved around the needs of the NHS – newly established in 1948 – which had outstripped training capacity and needed workers.
Then, as now, the role of migration in propping up a state approach to healthcare which would otherwise have failed was indispensable. But while important to the health service, the proportion of total migration accounted for by this demand was relatively small.
By 1958, 210,000 non-white Commonwealth migrants were living in the UK. In the same year, of 8,272 junior doctors in Great Britain 3,408 had been born elsewhere. Other figures, frustratingly only for 1965, suggest that there were about 5,000 Jamaican nurses and other workers staffing hospitals.
Combine these figures, and you get an estimate of about 4pc of the new population working in the NHS. Allow for dependents and missing data, and you might hit 10pc. Either way, to claim that the entirety of mass migration was justified by the NHS was well short of the mark.
Similarly, a narrative of labour shortages was constructed that took as granted a nationalised, unionised economy with rife overmanning, built to obtain full employment. Comparisons of vacancy lists to unemployment naturally resulted in the conclusion that labour was needed; the unwillingness of the Government to relax its grip on the economy or exchange rates meant that other routes to adjustment were difficult to follow.
In other words, migration in the post-war period was in part essential to the state's ability to carry out its plans, and in other part an unintended consequence of those efforts. By 1962, the Government was taking steps to restrain the inflow, wary of the scale of the political backlash it had triggered.
Usually, history doesn't repeat itself. Westminster, however, is gifted with a wonderful form of amnesia, and has managed to do so not once but twice.
First we had the New Labour loosening of migration policy in pursuit of ill-defined fiscal goals, alongside an unwillingness to restrict movement for newly joined EU member states. Predictions that 13,000 workers a year would arrive from Eastern Europe turned out to be off by a few thousand percentage points, and eventually popular unrest again led to legal changes, this time in the form of Brexit.
Yet almost the moment Boris Johnson took office he set about repeating the mistakes of his predecessors, implementing the greatest liberalisation of Britain's borders in decades.
The reasoning is almost painful to read: worries over shortages of workers even as the ranks of the economically inactive swelled, issues with pay in care homes downstream of government cuts to local authority budgets, the need to prop up a university sector which had seen tuition fees frozen, the NHS trotted out as the symbolic argument for migration when just 3pc of the 1.2m inflow in 2022 consisted of doctors and nurses.
And again, following vehement expressions of popular dissatisfaction, we find ourselves with a government promising long overdue action, and an opposition seeking to capitalise on this sentiment.
There is a limit to how many times a country can repeat a mistake without doing lasting damage.
Research from the Office for Budget Responsibility has made perfectly clear that staying on our current course is unaffordable.
Without reforms to Indefinite Leave to Remain, the care worker element of migration from 2021 to 2024 could cost the exchequer a lifetime sum of £61bn to £84bn on its own. The sheer size of the failure means that it must be at least partly undone, and Labour has made some noises about doing so.
But it would be a mistake to assume that everything before 2020 was good. Previous waves of migration have amply demonstrated how selecting the wrong migrants can lead to costs that linger for generations.
Despite large flows of recent migration – which tends to be fiscally positive in the years before workers age – it is still the case that black and Asian households in Britain receive more in state benefits than they pay in taxes, suggesting that previous migrants and their descendants may not have had the economic success we might have hoped for. Similarly, certain groups remain highly dependent on social housing.
The grand experiment of the post-war era is over. The results are in. Immigration might be the lifeblood of the British state, but it is hard to argue that it's been an unequivocal success for the British people.
The efforts to make it central to our shared understanding of history are less about genuine interest in our island story than they are justifying the mistakes of generations of politicians, the forging of a US-style narrative of a nation of immigrants for a very different country.
This isn't a game Reform needs to play.
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