Some political disasters take a very long time to live down, as the Tories will discover over the coming years. One thinks of Labour’s winter of discontent during which, as folklore records, rubbish piled high in the streets and bodies went unburied. Or Black Wednesday, subsequently renamed White Wednesday, when the pound sterling crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism, shattering the entire economic rationale of John Major’s Tory administration.
Long exiles to the naughty step followed each of those disastrous episodes for the party that oversaw them. This week we were presented with another: the true scale of immigration presided over by the Conservative party between 2019 and 2024.
We will live with the consequences for the rest of all our lives
The most shatteringly memorable statistic among many several on Thursday was that net immigration for the 12 months to June 2023 had been revised upwards by the Office for National Statistics from 740,000 to 906,000.
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