When will the Tories come clean on their migration plan?

Net annual immigration – which successive Tory manifestos promised the electorate would be brought down below 100,000 – has just topped 600,000, an all-time record. During 2022 some 606,000 more people immigrated into the UK than emigrated out of it, according to official figures from the Office for National Statistics. 

As a result, we must all look around for a new major city to use as a yardstick. The places traditionally deployed to give people an idea of the enormous scale of the influx such as Hull (population approx. 320,000) or Sunderland (340,000) or Rishi Sunak’s home city of Southampton (250,000) will no longer suffice. We are moving into the big league now. We could say instead that the net influx in a single year is nearly equivalent to the population of the entire Bristol metropolitan area (680,000) and bigger than the population of Sheffield (560,000). 

The original Tory promise of a ceiling of 100,000 typically came in at double, or treble, that number under David Cameron and Theresa May.