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NEW POLLING FROM MIGRATION WATCH SHOWS EXTENT OF POLITICAL BETRAYAL ON DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE
The ONS figures released yesterday make for alarming reading. The usual suspects lined up to tell us not to worry: net migration fell to 171,000 in the year ending December 2025, down from 331,000 a year earlier, extending a sharp decline from a record peak of 944,000 in 2023. But this, of course, masks the real problem.
Start with the cumulative picture. Between 2019 and 2024 (the so-called “Boriswave” of arrivals under the last Conservative government), a net 2,950,000 people migrated to the UK – the equivalent of two and a half Birminghams arriving in just 5 years. Even at a reduced rate of 171,000 a year, that is still a city the size of Oxford being added to the population every twelve months; people who need homes, school places, GP appointments, and seats on trains. The tap has been turned down. It has not been turned off, and the bathtub is already overflowing.
As our followers and supporters know, Migration Watch has for years drawn attention to the public’s concert about high, uncontrolled immigration. That is why we commissioned the excellent JL Partners to poll the public, specifically about the scale of immigration and its impact. In a nationally representative poll of 1,520 adults conducted in November 2025, 61 per cent said net migration between 2019 and 2024 had been too high, including 38 per cent who chose “far too high”: the single largest response category. Just 8 per cent said it was too low. No demographic group – not graduates, not Labour voters, not a single region of the United Kingdom – produced a majority saying levels were too low.
On the question of long-term demographic change, the findings were even more striking. Forty-nine per cent of respondents viewed the projection that the White British population would fall below half of the total by the 2060s negatively, with 33 per cent selecting “very negative”, the highest single-response intensity recorded anywhere in the poll. That figure exceeded concern about housing availability, crime, and the NHS. Politicians tell us the public are relaxed about demographic change and it is a fringe concern. Far from it. It is the most deeply held concern in the entire survey.
Yet Westminster continues to treat demographic transformation as a fait accompli, a process to be managed rather than a trajectory to be changed. The current Government, like its predecessor, offers modest visa adjustments while presiding over population growth and demographic change on a scale that no post-war electorate ever voted for. The pace of change may have slowed for the time being but it has not been altered, let alone reversed. And the government simply has no appetite for doing so.
The public can see and feel the pressure on housing, on public services, and on the character of their communities. They want net migration not merely reduced but brought to genuinely sustainable levels. Politicians must listen, and make the necessary action, or the gap between governing and governed will only grow wider.
The consequences of what has already happened are baked in. The ONS’s own national population projections, published earlier this year, show the UK population heading towards 74 million by the mid-2030s, driven overwhelmingly by migration. The longer-term picture is starker still. Professor Emeritus of Demography at Oxford University, Professor David Coleman, projects that the White British share of the population will fall below 50 per cent by the early 2060s. Indeed, he has been saying this for over 15 years. Other academics have more recently come to similar conclusions. We are facing a transformation in the demographic character of our country within half a lifetime, driven almost entirely by sustained high immigration, which no one ever voted for. The British people are being betrayed.
The full Migration Watch UK polling report, Public Attitudes Towards Migration, is available at https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/public-attitudes-to-migration/
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every week as soon as it is released.
