New UK immigration figures show net arrivals hit yet another record high of over 900,000 in 2023, but Brexit leader Nigel Farage warns against accepting claims migration is falling this year, citing a history of underestimated initial statistics.

Britain’s national statistician has released a new tranche of migration figures and revised previous years’ estimates, revealing the year to June 2023 hit another all-time record for arrivals. Net migration, being the total number of all long-term (non-tourist) arrivals minus departures from the country stood at 906,000 people, a remarkable number for a country with a population of — officially, at least — a little more than 68 million permanent residents.

The new year to June 2023 figure is another revision up for the statistic, taking it from the already historically high number of 672,000 claimed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) back in November 2023.

Also published today are the first estimates for arrivals in the year to July 2024, with 728,000 net arrivals said by the statistician to have arrived. The country experienced an estimated 1.2 million new people gross, and of those one million are ‘rest of world’ arrivals meaning not British returnees or Europeans.

The most common country for arrivals in the 2023-24 period were Indians, the ONS said, numbering nearly a quarter-million. Of the one million non-British, non-Euro arrivals a staggering eight per cent claimed for asylum through, as the modern jargon goes, “regularly” or “irregularly”, what would once have been called legally or illegally.

By comparing the first-estimate, uncorrected figures reckoned for 2024 arrivals to the more accurate, and considerably increased 2023 number the ONS has been able to claim that migration arrivals appear to be falling year-on-year. But Brexit leader Nigel Farage took aim at this conceit in a speech on Thursday morning, clearly implying his belief in time the 2024 figure would be revised upwards too.

Saying he was tired of “lies” around immigration, Mr Farage said as he announced the 100,000th member of the Reform UK party and a fresh defection of a former Conservative government minister, that: “this morning we got the latest immigration figures which are horrendous. Horrendous if you want to get a GP appointment, horrendous if you want to travel on Britain’s Motorways. Horrendous if you want your kids or grandkids to ever get a foot onto the housing ladder. Horrendous in terms of producing very disjointed societies and communities”.

On the ONS “spin”, Farage said not to beleive it, remarking: “the year before’s figures have been raised now in two instalments by 230,000, so let’s get it into our heads. In 2023 under a Conservative government nearly one million people — net! — people came into our country. This after manifestos in 2010, 2015, 2017, 2019, promising in the first three they’d reduce numbers to ‘tens of thousands a year’ and in the last one a substantial reduction.”

The ONS, for their part, appeared to be trying to have it both ways with the statistics, claiming a headline reduction on one hand while burying deeper in their report on the other the disclaimer that: “”Our international migration statistics are official statistics in development…. Our timely estimates for YE June 2024 and December 2023 are also provisional and will be updated as further and more recent data become available.”

The Conservatives should not be forgiven for talking right and governing left, he said, making reference to other statistics released today showing the cost of providing an asylum system is soaring. Mr Farage continued: “you may have noticed the quicker the population rises the poorer the average family in Britain becomes, and those figures are now undeniable. Of course with Labour it’s even worse… the asylum bill has gone up 36 per cent in one year to £5.38 billion, and that doesn’t even include the daily cost of what is happening in the English Channel”.

In the United Kingdom, natural population growth is negative, meaning more people die than are born. Yet the population continues to rise at record rates because the immigration to population ratio is so exceedingly high. In 2023 the population of the United Kingdom was estimated to have increased by one per cent in just a year.

Mass migration has previously been explained away by politicians as necessary for economic growth, however this argument has faded with time as Britain experienced record migration at the same time as a stagnant economy.