FIGURES published last Thursday showing that both net immigration and asylum claims are falling ‘are being used by Sir Keir Starmer to prove he’s turning things around and delivering for Britain’, the Telegraph reported.
People are not so easily taken in, however. The net migration figure of 171,000 last year – trumpeted as the lowest since 2012, and down from nearly a million in the year to 2023 – is created by taking away the number of people who left Great Britain from those who arrived. The figure that is not trumpeted is the roughly 246,000 British nationals who leave the UK each year to live abroad, of whom the latest stats show only about 110,000 return to the UK annually. This widening gap results in a net loss of more than 130,000 British a year and confirms that many are establishing lives overseas rather than coming back. Increasingly it is white, young and skilled Britons who are fleeing, as we reported at the beginning of the year. For the 12 months ending June 2025, 693,000 people left Britain, an increase of 40 per cent on 2022. Of those leaving, 230,000 were British nationals under 45 years of age.
