Transcript
iHerb Announcer (0:00)
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Sherrell Dorsey (0:45)
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Unherd Host (1:27)
Hello and welcome back to Unherd. What is the most significant political news story of the past week? Well, we think it's maybe something different to the story that has been all over the front pages here in the UK for days on end I. E. We don't think it is the budget nor any of the semi confected scandals around it, but in fact it's the immigration data that landed about halfway through last week from the Office of National Statistics. They say that long term international net migration, that is the numbers of people coming to the UK minus the numbers of people leaving the UK for the past year to June 2025 is down to 204,000. That is massively lower than the previous year, which in turn was massively lower than the year before. So the 2024 year was 649,000 and prior to that it was closer to a million. So we are seeing a precipitous fall in net migration to this country. The conservative minded media, in particular those around reform, for whom this is the central animating issue, sought to downplay that and to emphasize instead the large numbers of emigrating people, in other words the other side of the ledger, the numbers of people leaving the country and to try and portray that as its own crisis, that actually lots of good British people are fed up with the high tax and the lack of available housing and quite possibly the high levels of immigration and are therefore fleeing the country. There is an exodus, according to much of the conservative media of Britons, to places where their prospects are better. Maybe Australia or Abu Dhabi or the United States or even Europe. Is it actually true that. I don't think so. The main story is that immigration has massively come down. The emigration story is actually a lot more precarious once you start interrogating it. We wanted today to really dig into it and find out is this narrative true or is it actually not true at all? Our guest today is Madeleine Sumption, but before we come to her, I just want to emphasize that the politics of this could not be more important. The issue of immigration has risen to the top of all of the league tables. It is driving the national conversation here and it has completely inverted, thrown up in the air all of our political parties. Reform uk, the insurgent right wing party, is, according to the opinion polls, leading ahead of the Conservatives, ahead of Labour, who are in government, pretty much all on the back of people being fed up with high immigration numbers. So what will it do to our politics when immigration numbers come crashing down? I can't think of anything more profound, anything that is more likely to completely upend the political conversation once again. So it really, really matters what is true and what isn't true about these numbers. And so that's why we're going to give it the seriousness it deserves.
