Net migration fell to 177,000 in 2025, a long way down from the peak of over 900,000 in 2023. And already the whispering has started. The problem's solved, gone away, no need to worry. Supporters of Andy Burnham, for one, are known to back a less strict approach than Shabana Mahmood's.
They're gaslighting us. They don't want us to inquire into just how and why it was decided to allow somewhere between 3.2 million and 3.8 million people to arrive in the UK between January 2021 and June 2024. This is about half the number of arrivals over the previous 20 years and 4 times the average rate of arrivals over that time (nearly 7 million say they arrived between 2001 and 2021). It's around the population of the 6 largest English cities after London: Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester and Bristol. And it's more than the entire population of Greater Manchester including the boroughs of Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, Wigan and the city of Manchester.
This was the so-called "Boriswave" that we didn't really know about at the time. There was a net migration figure in just two and a half years of 2.6 million to 2.9 million. It wasn't so much a wave as a tsunami:
The Boriswave has been described as the single most important demographic event in modern British history. It was equivalent to a population growth of nearly 4%. To put it another way, at least 1 in every 25 people walking the streets of Britain today arrived in the last 5 years.
Indeed, reputable sources think we don't really have a clear picture and say that, despite efforts by the ONS to improve migration data, we still only have a relatively hazy picture of this extraordinary demographic phenomenon. The degree of cultural change is larger than implied in the net migration figure as there was a surge in emigration of British nationals. Some experts in the field believe that we'll only get a clearer picture with another census. Indeed academics floated the idea of an emergency 2026 census at the time of the 2021 census which had to adopt different methodology because of covid.
I know some people don't think that the extraordinary scale of this huge social experiment is of any significance whatsoever. They see immigration as an untrammelled good thing.
The Tories don't want you to enquire too much because they can't explain why they lost so much control of everything, including their senses. Labour don't want you to enquire too much because they don't want to have their hands tied and were complicit in previous surges in immigration. And many of its MPs and supporters don't see the problem anyway which is why they say the Home Secretary's plans to limit migration are "un-British". Wes Streeting, who might or might not be a candidate for the Labour leadership when he decides if he's got any balls, has branded people who question immigration to this country as "reactionaries". Better than the more normal term of "racist" I suppose. Most of us don't question immigration, Wes, we question who, how many, over what time, for what purpose and what pressures will it put on housing and services. Branding that reactionary is actually pathetically trying to avoid the debate. And I thought there might be more to him.
Reform bang on about the subject but other than sound bites about limiting numbers they don't engage in any actual debate about what the country needs and how to plan for it. Like all of their pronouncements they have the feel of a random array of sticking plasters with no coherent overarching analysis or strategy.
I listened to Chris Warburton interviewing a Home Office spokesman on Radio 5 Live recently. Warburton repeatedly pressed for what numerical targets the Home Office had for migration getting the slightly odd answer that they don't have any. "What, not even any informal, internal targets?" "No". I was hoping Warburton would ask a follow up question about the well known Treasury model's assumptions for migration, which tend to show more people = more growth. If the Treasury has a target, or at least a number in mind, won't the Home Office come under pressure to make sure economic growth isn't constrained by having too few people? If not, shouldn't they?
Of course the original spike in migration came under Blair, when the long term net migration total of 68,000 over the previous 25 years became 5.9 million in the following 25 years. But at least Blair and Brown were pretty open about what they were up to when they opened up for EU free movement in one go without any phasing which they could have done. They smirked that the arrival of useful people like Polish plumbers would be predominantly Labour voters. Cameron told us he'd get it back to a net annual figure of tens of thousands without justifying whether that sort of number would be optimal or apparently doing anything to deliver it.
The Boriswave was disporotionately made up of people arriving on health and care visas but, possibly in order to attract enough of them, they were allowed to bring in an extraordinary number of dependents. No-one has ever sought, to my knowledge, to show that those visas were actually necessary to maintain essential services or that the number of dependents arriving made any long term economic sense. It might do if they were mainly children, but not if they were of advanced years. The data would probably be very difficult to get. The lack of curiosity of civil servants and ministers of the time on these issues is perplexing. Or is it?
This area is crying out for dispassionate analysis and debate. Instead we just get move along now, nothing to see here. If anything happened it's stopped now. Sleep easy, leave it with us. Yes, sure.
While the net migration figure has fallen, Camilla Long noted that it wasn't even that good. Arrivals last year were still 813,00: almost the population of Greater Leeds. Down from 2023, sure, when it was as a bit bigger than Birmingham.
The politicians who are against immigration won't hear of the benefits. Those in favour seem unwilling to discuss the quantitative implications. Or bewilderingly think if you don't have open borders you're not being "kind" or "British". No other country I know of has politicians that talk that way.
Wouldn't it feel better to be treated like grown ups than condescended to by a bunch of cowards?
Or as Camilla Long said isn't the most patriotic thing you could do now - what is true love of one's country - is to reject people who trash it and pretend it's you who's the problem.
I assure you, you're not. They are.
P.S.
Concern about large numbers of incomers is of course far from new. Our innate concern about the unfamiliar, in particular people, isn't as I understand it, built into our DNA. Rather it's linked to one of the oldest parts of the hunan brain, the amydala and our fight or flight reflex. Though clearly it then becomes more than that longer term: we come to terms with it, sometimes finding logical reasons to reject it or perhaps finding information, arguments or excuses to support it.
I read a review of a book on the history of early modern period Britain recently and hostility to immigrants featured significantly. On May Day 1517 London apprentices rioted against "strangers and aliens", looting their homes and shops and breaking into Newgate prison to free a group of youths who had been arrested for assaulting foreigners.
In those times many believed that "aliens and strangers eate the bread from the poore fatherless children". Others feared that foreigners brought their pregnant wives over so that their offspring would "win...the liberty that other Englishmen do enjoy" while arguing that such children "retain an inclination and kind affection to the countries of their parents".
Although many felt solidarity with the numerous protestant refugees who arrived in the decades after the Reformation, they came in such vast numbers that, by the 1570s, nearly 40% of Norwich's population was foreign-born. When the Flemish hatmaker Clais van Weveken arrived there in the mid 1560s he reassured his wife that "the English [are] quite loving to our nation". But attitudes hardened in difficult times and by 1593 worshippers at London's Dutch Church were receiving death threats.
Religious prejudice was a growing problem for English Catholics, so this may not all have been about where people came from.
Nevertheless, I'd say it all goes to show that if you preside over a sudden and major demographic shift you can't just assume that people will accept it. Especially if you try to tell them that they are imagining the problem, it isn't there or has gone away.
The above is extracted from Katherine Harvey's review of the book This Little World - a new history of Tudor and Stuart England by Nadini Das, published by Bloomsbury which appeared in the Sunday Times Culture section on 24 May 2026.
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Sources for main post:
Camilla Long. Politicians insist we share their values even if they're the only ones that still believe in them. Sunday Times 24 May 2026
The Guardian. What do the immigration figures for the UK really show? 15 Sept 2025
A migration revolution. Migration Observatory briefing document covering the scale of immigration and net migration in the UK since the early 2000s and under the post-Brexit immigration system. December 2025
Centre for Policy Studies. A Migration Revolution. Nov 2025
Population of English cities and Greater Manchester from Wikipedia.
Some sources quote higher numbers than I've used here: rather than 3.8 million total arrivals in 2021 to mid 2024 I've seen 4.8 million reported for the total inflow in the full 3 years of 2021-24. The lack of good and timely data doesn't help.
