For a government wanting to reduce immigration – and that is something Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has said it wishes to do – there will never be a better set of net migration numbers than those that the Office for National Statistics issued last week.
In the 12 months ending in June, net migration fell to 204,000, a drop of 78% from its peak just two years earlier. That’s almost 750,000 fewer people arriving. Governments rarely, if ever, have “wins” on that kind of scale on their declared policy.
Yes, this fall was expected – that peak figure included arrivals from Ukraine and Hong Kong, for example – but it was real. This is exactly what Reform, the Daily Mail, and most of the British right have insisted they wanted day after day ever since Labour got back into power.
Naturally, the government got absolutely no credit – or even any good headlines – as a result of this. The Mail ran a splash headline complaining of “THE BRAIN DRAIN FROM STARMER’S SOCIALIST CHAOS”. The Telegraph greeted the news as “Young people flee Labour’s high-tax Britain”.
Meanwhile, Zia Yusuf of the Reform party ignored the headline figures and noted that asylum hotel use was at a high, later adding on X that: “693,000 people left the UK in the year to June. That is the highest number in a century.”
The implication of all of these is that the net migration numbers are somehow giving a false picture, or lying – or that a mass exodus of Brits fleeing the hellhole that is Starmer’s Britain is masking the ongoing immigration numbers. That implication, though, is untrue.
First, the raw immigration numbers have fallen dramatically. Last year, just under 900,000 people moved to the UK long-term – down almost 600,000 from the peak figure. Of those 900,000, around 150,000 were British citizens who had previously emigrated returning to the UK, a number that has been fairly steady over the past decade. Around 85,0000 were EU citizens, roughly steady on the year before, but down 200,000 from the peak.
The bulk, though – 670,000 arrivals – were non-EU citizens. This was down around 400,000 on just a year earlier. Even before taking emigration into account at all, immigration is drastically down, and the fall is almost exclusively concentrated in non-EU citizens.
What about the other half of the net migration figure – the supposed Starmer “brain drain”, the exodus of young Brits? Put simply, it’s largely non-existent. The number of Brits leaving the UK appears to have been steady for a decade or more, though a change in methodology in 2021 revised this figure up slightly. Since that revision, it has held remarkably steady at around 250,000 a year.
This year is the first one in which emigration was broken down by age, which has allowed newspapers and commentators to highlight the number of young Brits leaving – but given that there is no increase in the overall figures, it is much likelier that young Brits always formed a large portion of emigrees. After all, who is likelier to leave the country: the young person with no family or relationship ties, or someone married with young children at school?
Emigration did rise, though – because more non-EU citizens are going home, or at least moving to other countries. In the 12 months ending in June, 286,000 such people left the UK – a sizeable increase on just a few years before.
Put bluntly, net migration fell because 400,000 fewer foreigners arrived, and 200,000 more foreigners left the UK since the peak. This is precisely what Reform, the Mail, and the new, nastier Conservative Party have claimed – again and again – they wanted to happen. And now that it has, they have ignored it entirely.
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The Conservative Party spent the last 14 years promising to cut net migration – repeatedly pledging in manifestos to cut it to “tens of thousands” – even as it often did the exact opposite. Still, that has not stopped them getting more radical in opposition. Robert Jenrick now insists the UK needs a period of “net emigration” (a situation usually correlated with major economic or political crises). This outdoes even Nigel Farage, who has acknowledged “some essential migration” is necessary, even if he claims “net migration should be zero”.
Matt Goodwin, who at 43 years old was appointed last month the head of Reform’s student wing, took a similar tack, posting an inevitable Substack “deep dive” explaining “Why the ‘Fall’ in Net Migration is not what you think”, which then went on to set out why the numbers are, in fact, exactly what they look like – before engaging in the equally inevitable rug-pull, insisting that even if the real figure is 204,000, that’s still far too high. In other words, the attacks on the government did not relent even for a day.
There is an obvious lesson to take from this, that the government seems almost certain to ignore: there is no way for the government to win for as long as it plays this game. There is no policy outcome it can deliver that will stop the narrative, or that will see it being credited for delivering what these politicians supposedly want. The goalposts will be endlessly shifted.
The very fact of the immigration “crisis” peaking in the last year shows how divorced the narrative is from reality – even as the issue climbed to the top of public awareness, actual immigration was in freefall.
There are some real issues for the government in this. Lower immigration means lower economic growth. The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts assume net migration will be around 350,000. If it stays at 200,000 or below, that will reduce both GDP growth and government tax receipts – Rachel Reeves could soon have to find around £10bn a year of extra revenue.
Additionally, the drop-off in migration is concentrated among those coming to the UK to study and to work – both groups that provide significant revenue and other benefits to the UK. As those figures drop, and asylum applications hold steady, migration ironically starts to look a lot more like voters imagine – asylum claimants are becoming a much larger fraction of total immigration. Ironies abound.
Immigration was just one way in which the futility of No 10’s current approach was brought to the fore this week. Net migration fell by almost 80% and it got no good headlines, no reward, and no poll boost.
Similarly, in the budget, Reeves backed off from almost every potentially unpopular measure she considered. There was no income tax rise, almost no new taxes on capital gains, none of the mooted tax changes on law and accountancy partnerships, and only a very modest mansion tax.
Nonetheless, almost every right wing paper in the country is baying for the chancellor’s blood, saying she must resign for misleading the nation as to why she U-turned on tax – with some even calling for regulators to investigate. The pre-budget comms were terrible, but the idea that they were criminal is nonsense. Labour is trying to play a rigged game and seems shocked that it’s losing.
The party seems determined to upset and alienate its own voters to appease Reform’s base – who overwhelmingly didn’t vote Labour in 2024, when it won a landslide. Last week’s immigration figures show why that will never pay off. Even if the figures say what those voters want them to, they simply won’t believe it.
Similarly, Labour backed away from any major reforms in this year’s budget out of fear of how they would land with voters. What resulted was months of headlines about those measures, and all of the negative press that would have come with it anyway – but with none of the actual reforms that would have raised money and might have changed things.
No 10 is stuck in a losing game, trying to win over people who will never treat them fairly, let alone ever give them a win. If there is a lesson here, it’s the one from the end of the iconic 1980s movie War Games: the only winning move is not to play.
