Boris Johnson is trying to wash his hands of the unprecedented wave of migration that has seen more than one million people move to the UK in each of the last three years. He was confronted about this ‘Boriswave’ on the Triggernometry podcast yesterday and told the hosts that rather than being the result of his decisions, Covid and the Migration Advisory Committee were to blame. Are his explanations convincing?
First, he said the bounce was due to people leaving the country in the pandemic and returning afterwards: ‘If you look at what actually happened, the numbers go down, we had a huge number of people leave the country because of Covid… You then have a lot of students coming back to complete their courses, who push up the numbers in that so-called wave.’
The ONS’s estimates tell a different story. There’s no large spike in emigration during the pandemic. (Other ONS figures, from the Labour Force Survey, suggest that the foreign-born population of the country fell by a million in the year after the pandemic began.)
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