No government statistic showing an increase of 24% in a single year can be ignored. This will certainly not be the fate of the news from the Office for National Statistics on Thursday that net migration to the United Kingdom has risen from 488,000 in 2021 to 606,000 in 2022. The new figure is nearly double the 2018 level, which itself led the Conservative party to pledge, in its 2019 general election manifesto, that net migration would be reduced during the current parliament.
As a broken pledge and a policy failure this takes some beating. But it is par for the course. The 2019 pledge is one of a series of unrealisable and often cruelly deceitful migration promises made by the Conservatives in the past 20 years. Rishi Sunak’s focus on the Channel small boats and Thursday’s repeated pledge to bring the numbers down shows how little has changed.
