Some of the most insane figures you’ll read this year. Simply put, you cannot accurately understand British life, or British politics, if you aren’t aware of them. I say this as someone who’s descended from immigrants btw:
‘From June 2021 to June 2025 approximately 4 million migrants of various types came to Britain. According to the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, more people moved to Britain in those four years than the entire population of Wales. To give this some grounding in our country’s deep and ancient history, the Welsh are the ethnic group most closely descended from the original Brythonic inhabitants of the British Isles. They are now outnumbered by migrants who arrived in just those four years.
The incomprehensible scale of this migration is comparable in size to England’s entire 17th century population. To call these figures incomprehensible is not rhetorical flourish; people quite literally don’t understand the numbers. Research from the thinktank Onward published in 2024 found that voters believed that about 70,000 migrants had entered England in the preceding year. Net migration in 2023 had in fact been 672,000.
Between 2001 and 2020 the size of Britain’s foreign-born population doubled.
By 2025 one in 30 people living in Britain had arrived as a migrant in the previous four years under the Tory government. Strikingly, 10% of all residents of England do not identify with any UK national identity.
Between 1975 and 2025 the white British population of London declined from 85% to 37%… While legal migration soared, Britain’s southern coast was beset by illegal immigration in the small boat crisis.
Between January and April 2025 more than 10,000 illegal immigrants arrived. This is about as many men of fighting age as were in William the Conqueror’s army at the Battle of Hastings. In 2022 45,000 illegal migrants came ashore in Britain in small boats. This is a larger group of men than the Roman Army that conquered Britain in 43 AD.
These changes are without precedent in the entirety of English history. They are not incidental migrations, they will reconfigure the country forever.
This is a lengthy quote from
@BenBarryJones’ Island of Strangers.