Yesterday, newly revised date showed net inflows were an off-the-chart 906,000 in the year to June 2023.
Net arrivals in the 12 months to June this year were lower but still a massive 720,000.
Starmer held a hurried press conference yesterday where he pursued the usual Labour line of blaming the Tories, saying they had failed “time and again” to get the system under control.
And you know what? He’s right.
Labour is not to blame for the immigration rush. None of these figures happened on Starmer’s watch. Labour took power on July 6, 2024, just after the latest period ended.
This one is down to the Tories, the party that repeatedly posed as tough on immigration.
Starmer said he did a “double take” on seeing the numbers. I get that. The whole country has a double take on immigration.
We need to a single-minded response to stop public anger over this issue from tearing democracy apart, as is happening across Europe.
All the Conservative Party gave us was double talk.
For more than a decade, Tory leaders promised to crack down on illegal migration and slash the number of arrivals.
The result? Both legal and illegal immigration soared.
Ministers demonised immigrants with one hand, then waved them in with the other to keep the GDP figures sweet.
David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak all did it. Sunak’s Rwanda scheme was playing a double game too.
It cost taxpayers £700 million and generated an awful lot of headlines, but didn’t remove a single soul.
The left also indulge in immigration double talk. They decry any efforts to curb the numbers while simultaneously moaning about the UK’s housing shortage.
They deny any link between the fact that we lack a million homes while a million people enter the country every year.
It’s a perfect example of doublethink, a phrase invented by George Orwell who described it as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”.
Human rights lawyers are masters at doublethink too.
They’ll sink every effort to stop the boats, even though by doing so they’re only enabling brutal criminal trafficking gangs.
Not to mention encouraging desperate people to risk their lives crossing the Channel.
The French are sick of our perfidious doublethink. We berate Calais cops for failing to stop the boats but encourage arrivals by letting them vanish into our jobs black market.
A national identity card would change that but even many who decry immigration refuse to debate it.
Unfortunately, we’re all guilty of doublethink on this emotive subject.
People complain about immigrants driving down wages for the lowest paid, but most Brits don’t want to do those jobs themselves.
Many new arrivals work in the care sector, helping older Britons spend their final months in dignity, or doing the backbreaking work of gathering crops to feed us.
A lot of Brits don’t want to do that – and since I’m not applying myself it’s hard to blame them – but we can’t gripe when employers hire cut-price foreigners to do our dirty work.
Who’ll do that if we slash immigration to zero?
We also need to sort out the fact that six million Brits of working age are living on benefits while we import labour to do the jobs they can’t or won’t. More doublethink.
Starmer didn’t cause this mess. Even this lefty lawyer reckons the numbers are “far too high” adding: “It is our job to turn it around and we will.”
Now let’s assume that he actually means that, and it’s not just another double cross.
For once, the PM is right. He didn’t cause the problem. But it’s down to him to solve it.
Unfortunately, recent months have shown that Starmer is a dab hand at doublethink too.
Some straight thinking is required to curb mounting public fury. Otherwise we’re all in trouble. Double trouble.
