The Boat People

 The news is full of stories relating to boat people, Rwanda, International Law, has Rishi done enough or has he gone too far? There is no doubt that there are lot of problems in the good ship the United Kingdom: There are not enough houses, the NHS is struggling with not enough beds and not enough staff. We are bursting at the seams and it is all the fault of the boat people!!

If we stop the boats we solve the problem, at least that is the narrative that is being portrayed.

The only trouble with this is that the migration figures do not stack up. The provisional estimate of total long-term immigration for year ending (YE) June 2023 was 1.2 million, while emigration was 508,000, meaning that net migration was 672,000; most people arriving to the UK in the YE June 2023 were non-EU nationals (968,000), followed by EU (129,000) and British (84,000).

Net migration for YE June 2023 was 672,000, which is slightly higher compared with YE June 2022 (607,000) but down on our updated estimate for YE December 2022 (745,000); while it is too early to say if this is the start of a new downward trend, these more recent estimates indicate a slowing of immigration coupled with increasing emigration.(Figures from the Office for National Statistics website).

So all the focus is on circa 50,000 boat people out of a total net migration number of 672,000. There is a lot that the politicians, of all parties, are not telling us. Blaming migration is an easy way to avoid confronting the reality that for years we have underfunded the NHS, that we have not built enough homes and that it is overlooking the fact that many in the caring porfessions are migrants.

Many of the systems in the UK need a complete overhaul, we need a long hard honest discussion about the type of country that we aspire to be - but it is so much easier to blame the foreigner!