Net migration to the United Kingdom has hit 672,000 a year, tens of thousands higher than the last, another crushing blow to the final shreds of credibility the governing Conservatives could yet cling to.

1.2 Million new people came to the United Kingdom in the year ending June 2023, which minus those who left in the same period leaves the country have experienced a net increase of 672,000. The figure is a considerable rise on the 607,000 admitted in the previous comparable period, the year to June 2022, the Office for National Statistics said.

The soaring level of arrivals is causing a population boom in Britain, the likes of which have not seen since since the ‘baby boom’ that followed the Second World War. ONS spokesman Neil Park said in a statement published alongside the statistics of this growth that: “the population of England and Wales has grown at the fastest rate seen since 1962.

“However, unlike the baby boom driving population growth in the 1960s, the increases seen today are predominantly being driven by international migration”.

The figures are incredibly embarrassing for the UK’s Conservative government which has traded on the promise — albeit quite probably a hollow one — at elections for many years that it would bring down migration from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands. Instead, migration has soared under 13 years of Tory government and is on its way to one and a half million in two years.

While those on the right have understandably expressed their distress at this obvious failure to respect the very most basic wishes and interests of the electorate, migration levels are now so incredibly high the government is now even being credibly attacked from the left on the issue.

Blairite Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said today the figures are “shockingly high” and represent a “failure”.

Those from the right also expressing dismay include Tory grandee Sir Iain Duncan Smith who said the figures were “unacceptable” given the soaring population “puts pressure on housing and support services, social services, massive pressure on those which creates problems for the UK’s existing citizens.”

Suella Braverman, the erstwhile Home Secretary who was responsible for migration control until she was sacked from the government last week continued her attack on her former boss the Prime Minister over the numbers, claiming while in office she was determined to control migration but was prevented from doing so. The level of arrivals now is a “slap in the face” to voters, she remarked.

Braverman said: “Today’s record migration stats show we’ve let in an extra million people in just 2 years, a population equivalent to Birmingham. The pressure on housing, the NHS, schools, wages, and community cohesion, is unsustainable.” The former minister, now widely seen as angling for the top job herself, said there should be a hard cap on annual immigration, something many have said would be essential for making the UK’s post-Brexit skills-bassed visa system work credibly for the long term, but which was omitted.

The new, higher migration level statistics come just one day after the Conservatives attempted a slam-dunk on the opposition Labour party in Parliament, attempting to claim they were in favour of dangerously high levels of migration, and that the Conservatives were a force of moderation on border control.

A contributing factor to the vast migration figures is that governance of legal migration to the United Kingdom, which has soared and continues to rise, is rarely is ever talked about in public as all oxygen in the media space is consumed by the migrant boat crisis. While serious and a clear demonstration of the incompetence of the government, it also amounts to a fleetingly small number of people arriving annually compared to those granted legal visas by the very clearly unconservative open borders migration system.