Net migration to the United Kingdom is already at record-breaking levels. Now, Britain’s corporate media is demanding far more.
In an editorial headlined ‘it’s time for Tories to admit that Britain needs foreign workers’ – Guardian sister paper the Observer bemoaned the fact the new statistics will likely trigger “an arbitrary debate about whether levels of immigration are too high that is divorced both from economic realities and public opinion.”
The Observer claims that the current record-breaking levels of immigration are not “out of step with public opinion”, though this is at odds with years of YouGov trackers, which indicate that, as of May 1st 2023, 57 per cent of Britons think immigration over the last 10 years has been “too high,” against 17 per cent who think it has been “about right” and just 11 per cent who think it has been “too low” – with the “too high” figure rising to 62 per cent when only working-class and lower-middle-class social grades are considered.
One unequivocally accurate statement in the Observer editorial, however, is that “high net-migration numbers are a feature, not a bug of government policy,” despite Conservative Party rhetoric on reducing numbers.
Britain’s Conservative Party promised ahead of the 2010, 2015, and 2017 general elections to cut net immigration “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands”. It now stands at over a million a year.
