Contrary to long-standing promises from Britain’s governing Conservative Party, net migration is expected to remain in the hundreds of thousands for the foreseeable future, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicted this week.
In its list of Spring projections, the Office for Budget Responsibility said that net migration will remain at around 245,000 per year until at least the 2026/27 fiscal year, revising the estimate up by 40,000 more migrants compared to its previous release in November.
Alongside increases in refugee applications from Hong Kong and Ukraine, the statistician agency pointed to the post-Brexit points-based immigration system implemented by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a key factor in the continued high waves of migration, given that it failed to set a firm annual cap on migration.
However, in comments provided to Breitbart London, Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, suggested that annual arrivals over the coming years could actually be even higher: “The OBR’s assumption of net migration settling at 245,000 per annum has no basis. It was over half a million in the year to June 2022 and very likely to have been even higher for the whole of last year.”
“The expectation that it will be around a quarter of a million by 2026 is fantasy. It also suggests that the government has no intention of getting a grip of the scale of immigration, as the public want,” he explained.
“Failing to do so will only lead to further massive, unsustainable population increase, as happened in just 20 years when it was the prime driver of an eight million growth in our population.”
Despite many voters backing the Conservative Party in the 2019 election in the hopes of finally having a government free from European Union rules and able to actually reduce the number of migrants coming to the country, the opposite occurred, with a record 1.1 million visas being issued to foreigners and net migration hitting a record half a million last year — nearly doubling the peaks seen under the leftist Labour administration of Tony Blair.
Since the days of David Cameron’s premiership from 2010 to 2016, Conservative governments consistently paid lip service to the notion of reducing the number of migrants coming into the country, vowing to cut net migration in their 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2019 election manifestos, yet numbers have only continued to increase.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said during last Summer’s leadership contest to replace Johnson — which he lost — that if put into office he would seek to reduce migration, but he refused to commit to a hard annual cap and has made no significant moves to restrict migration since being installed in Downing Street in a globalist-backed coup against the shortly-tenured Prime Minister Liz Truss.
While Home Secretary Suella Braverman has previously said that the government should fulfil its longstanding promise to the people to bring down net migration to “the tens of thousands”, her tenure in the Cabinet has so far been consumed with failed attempts to solve the illegal boat migrant crisis in the English Channel rather than tackle legal mass migration, despite it having far more impact on the demographic trajectory of the country.
Recent data from the once-in-a-decade Census also revealed that the percentage of native Britons in England and Wales had fallen below 75 per cent.
Despite promising to “take back control” of the nation’s borders, the foreign-born population rose from around 7.5 million a decade ago to around 10.4 million today — roughly equivalent to the combined populations of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, or around a sixth of the UK population overall.
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