A survey found that the plurality of Britons see immigration as negative, while a majority said only Nigel Farage’s party is telling the truth about the issue.
A poll conducted by YouGov for Sky News found that 43 per cent of the British public believed that immigration was doing more harm than good, compared to 35 per cent who felt it was a positive influence on the country. The only regions of the UK in which more people believed that mass migration was a net good for society were London and Scotland.
The most significant divide in perceptions was by age, with 54 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds believing that immigration was positive overall, while 58 per cent of people above the age of 65 said that its impacts on society were negative.
Strikingly, fewer women said they felt immigration was good for the economy than men, with just 34 per cent of women agreeing with the sentiment compared to 43 per cent of men. Overall, the country was split on the economic ramifications of immigration, with 39 per cent seeing it as bad for the country’s economy and 37 saying it improves the economy.
Unsurprisingly, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK was the only political party the public believed on immigration, with 60 per cent saying that the populist party was actually telling the truth about their position on the issue.
Conversely, 52 per cent of the public said that they do not believe the rhetoric on immigration from the left-wing Labour Party, while 49 per cent said that they thought the Conservatives of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak were not being truthful about their true position.
The survey went on to find that the public largely believes that the government could cut immigration if it wanted to but is unwilling to do so because of the potential backlash.
The distrust among the public is perhaps to be expected, given the fact that they have been consistently lied to by the government for well over a decade on immigration. The governing Conservative Party committed in their 2010, 2015, and 2017 election manifestos to bring down net migration — the total number of foreigners allowed in minus the people who left the country — to the tens of thousands per year. In 2019, the Boris Johnson-led Conservatives abandoned the specific target but still promised to reduce immigration overall.
None of these pledges were fulfilled, and in fact, immigration massively increased under the Conservatives, with Johnson’s post-Brexit immigration reforms opening up immigration to nearly the entire world without a firm annual cap.
This resulted in record waves of foreigners into the country, with net migration hitting a staggering 764,000 in 2022, the highest number on record. While official numbers were down slightly last year, with current estimates claiming 685,000 in net migration in 2023, given the history of figures being revised upwards, it is likely that the figure will increase.
Prime Minister Sunak has attempted to claim that the slight reduction demonstrates his desire to cut numbers. Ahead of the July 4th election, Sunak said that if re-elected, his government would seek to “halve” net migration over the next year — a number that would still be unthinkable high during most of British history — and then introduce an unspecified annual cap going forward.
The left-wing Labour Party has also vowed to reduce immigration, however, like the Conservatives, they have so far refused to set a specific numerical target.
On Monday, Nigel Farage unveiled his Reform party’s “contract” with the people — rejecting the use of the term ‘manifesto’ given its association with lies. Mr Farage said that his party would seek to put a “freeze” on all non-essential immigration in order to alleviate the pressure on housing, the labour market, schools, the National Health Service, and British society itself, warning that the country is “in decline culturally” and that only a pause on immigration could “help us at least try to catch up”.