Shortly before Britain went to the polls for the 2010 General Election, then Opposition Leader David Cameron released the Conservative Party’s manifesto, pledging to cut net migration into the U.K. from 200,000 people per year to “tens of thousands of people per year”.
At the time, polling showed that immigration was the second most important issue to the voting public, with the exception of the economy, which, given the challenges Britain was facing with the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, was perhaps unsurprising.
Prime Minister Cameron would then go on to affirm his commitment to cutting migration into Britain to tens of thousands on multiple occasions, both during his Prime Ministership and again at the 2015 General Election.
In the years that followed, Cameron’s successors in the role of Conservative Party Prime Minister, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Rishi Sunak, would all pledge to cut migration into Britain dramatically.
But none of them ever did.
At the end of the 2023 calendar, net overseas migration into Britain stood at 860,000, almost four times the level Prime Minister Boris Johnson had promised to significantly cut from and more than eight times what the Cameron government promised to achieve.
The British public’s frustration with the government’s inability to keep their promises on migration arguably played a major role in Britain’s exit from the European Union, with immigration ranked as the most important issue to the electorate in the run-up to the Brexit referendum.
Fast forward to the present day, the British people’s support for migration has effectively collapsed.
According to the latest comprehensive polling on the issue from YouGov, just 22% of Britons support the current rate of migration, despite it being roughly halved from 2023 levels.
In terms of a scenario in which the number of migrants into the U.K. had a “large decrease”, but “some” migration was still allowed, 56% of respondents supported that course of action, with 32% opposing.
A far more significant shift in which there was zero migration and a “large numbers of migrants who came to the U.K in recent years leave”, saw 45% support the hypothetical proposal with 44% opposed.
The data also went on to illustrate that voters had concerns regarding values and integration, even with legal migrants.
When asked if legal migrants shared the same values as the British people, 32% of respondents said yes, 43% said no, and 25% said they didn’t know.
In terms of integration into British society, 43% believed that legal migrants had integrated successfully, with 41% taking the view that they did not integrate successfully.
These numbers reveal a Britain in which there are deep reservations held on migration conceptually, not just as it relates to those entering the country illegally.
It’s clear that the British government and political establishment know what the electorate wants. Otherwise they wouldn’t have spent the last 15 years promising to cut migration again and again.
However, the government and political establishment have consistently ignored the will of the British people, leading to growing frustration.
The experience of the British electorate has, unfortunately, not been unique in this regard, with nations across the Anglosphere pursuing levels of migration that are generally opposed by a majority of the electorate.
It’s also worth noting that the relative level of migration into Britain, even at its absolute peak seen in 2022, is still significantly less in per capita terms than levels seen in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Ultimately it would appear that migration is an issue where democracy is no longer working the way that it should.
