Cheerful news: Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England governor, thinks the economic outlook for the year ahead is “worst I have ever seen” — a challenge of such severity that it should be the main preoccupation of both the Government and its possible Labour heirs. Instead, fizzing anxiety at Westminster has been unleashed by the release of last year’s immigration figures, showing a surge to some three-quarters of a million people with the audacity to view the United Kingdom as an attractive place to live.
No doubt immigration is sorely testing the old consensus of open doors across Europe — from the far-Right Geert Wilders’s win in the Netherlands to Germany’s centre Left-led coalition anxiously pledging to speed up removals of failed asylum seekers and hardening border controls. But the response to the 2022 annual figure of 745,000 net migration has been a spasm of exaggerated horror among Tories facing an electoral bushtucker trial election year — with a fundamental self-inflicted flaw to confront and Nigel Farage about to return to the barricades.
