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September 13, 2024 - 7:00am
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has published a report showing that unless something drastic changes, Government debt is set to almost triple in the next five decades — from around 100% of GDP today to around 274% in 2071. The timing of the report is surely not a coincidence: it overlaps with Keir Starmer’s government starting a harsh campaign of austerity which will include tax increases and cuts to key components of social spending, such as fuel support for pensioners.
But these latest numbers from the OBR give the lie to Labour’s claim that austerity is required in the short term to improve the health of the economy in the long term. With numbers like these, the Government is clearly preparing the British population for a permanent and potentially drastic reduction in living standards. That is, Labour is the first of probably many governments to lead Britain into a period of managed decline.
Among a range of problems, one that stands out is demographics. Birth rates have been below replacement level since 1973, meaning that Britain’s population is ageing, and this ageing is starting to bite. Ironically, the Baby Boomers and younger generations lowered their birth rates mainly so that they could work and consume more, thereby boosting the economy. But this is turning out to be a sugar rush that only lasted two generations: now Millennials and Generation Z have to deal with the consequences.
The OBR report is also softening the population up for more immigration. It states that immigration is one way to bring public debt down because it will allow for economic growth. The report estimates an average of 315,000 net immigrants a year — and in estimating this, it feels like it is setting a target for the Treasury and the Home Office. This implies 14.8 million new immigrants by 2070, which in turn means that, assuming that there is a roughly static population due to low birth rates and ageing, immigrants will go from making up around 15% of the population today to making up around 31% of the population in 2070.
According to the report, Britain can solve its fiscal problems by increasing productivity growth — which has been effectively stagnant for around 15 years. This makes the OBR estimate of 1.5% growth per year on average extremely optimistic, and so the economic problems facing Britain are probably worse than what the report forecasts. It states that for every 0.1% average rate of growth above 1.5% annually, the public debt will fall by 25% of GDP by 2070. The phrase “if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride” comes to mind.
The OBR report is not merely a forecast of the future state of Britain: it is a roadmap laying out how the Civil Service will manage the decline of the country over the next 50 years. The plan is clear: extremely high rates of population replacement, much higher taxes, and much lower social spending. It is starting to feel like Britain’s grim future is predetermined.
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SubscribeSince Professor David Miles, also associated with the OBR, released data yesterday indicating that every low skilled immigrant costs the country £150,000, this particular solution will only add fuel to the fiscal fire. His report concludes if immigrants earn 33% more than UK average income they become net contributors, but there are not enough of these to fill the global demographic deficit. Whilst cyclically the European economic tide is structurally.going out, allowing the ponzi immigration scheme to continue will leave us increasingly at internal war over who gets the smallest share of the declining national pie.
£150,000 and the rest.
My father used to say that figures can’t lie but liars can figure.
In order to be a net contributor in this country now you have to earn at least £42K pa and I have seen the figure put as high as £48K.
The cost of any of the immigrants earning significantly less that £42K (and the vast majority will be) will very quickly exceed £150K and that is before their dependants are factored in.
Mass third world immigration is utterly destroying Europe. It is a huge drain on resources, culture the environment and security. Europe will be an Afro Islamic ghetto in 20 years.
We’ve been living a lie for decades. Reality eventually catches up with us; whether it’s from spending beyond our means, or not making enough babies.
….and it could have been so easily avoided but we handed democracy over to “experts”.
I have a genuine question. Please could you define democracy?
Are you sure that’s genuine question?
To elect parties with a set of policies that will govern with a reasonable degree of competence in the overall interest of the country. Is this why Starmer intentionally uses the phrase “A party of service” when clearly it’s not.
From the early ’90s, democracy was parcelled off to supranational bodies, banks, NGOs/ think tanks in order to impart their wisdom upon us through ideology.
“Because of our incompetence, you the people must accept more authoritarian measures in order for us to continue with further incompetence”.
Thanks for that and it was a genuine question. I sort of see your point but I think your idea is old-fashioned. I don’t really agree with you for a couple of reasons based on the fact that life gets ever-more complicated.
1) We are more international in our approach and our needs than we have ever been. Now we have pandemics, as we did with Spanish Flu, but today people think we can control them. Can political parties do this? No. So they bring in experts and they aren’t really experts, just people with strong opinions.
2) In the past, when democracy was invented, we didn’t have things like exchange rates because we compared everything to gold. Now the system is so complicated that no political parties can control it. Answer – the banks, who make money for themselves first. Or we go back to the gold standard but how can our politicians do that on the international stage?
3) The biggest influence on our lives is the internet. How does a political party, a group of misfits who might have studied the classics, handle the internet?
4) Also important is the climate issue. Personally, I think that all this pseudo-science behind the climate issues is silly and wrong. But how do elected experts on the classics wade through climate science? Does Ed Milliband understand the science behind the climate discussion?
Your idea of a political party, which has studied the democracy of the Greek civilisation, is just outdated. If you asked everyone on UnHerd about democracy you would get a different answer.
Interesting points, thank you.
Mass immigration of the type experienced by the UK only slightly grew GDP and it did not grow GDP faster than the liabilities it has created. This is quite a fundamental issue not to cover in the article.
The average immigrant to the UK is a net dependent despite the huge savings on education and early years support. Mass immigration of this kind isn’t fixing the problem of unsustainable public finances, it is compounding it.
Simultaneously, mass immigration is stalling productivity growth. There is literally no economic incentive to invest lots of capital in uncertain productivity improvements when a nearly unlimited unskilled labour supply can be imported today.
What we are talking about is a population ponzi scheme.
Nell
Spot on as usual
Actually you are wrong on the net dependent point. The ‘average’ migrant makes a net contribution – they pay more in tax etc than they take out. And fairly obvious why – we haven’t paid for their education!
However low skilled/paid migrants do not make the same net contribution. So your point has some validity if you are more nuanced.
The OBR report outlines what likely happens if we do nothing. Clearly we have options to rely less on migrants via productivity/technology. But there will be a limit. Demographics is demographics. And remember all this known when we decided we’d swop EU migration for much wider Global migration with the additional cultural challenges that arguably gives us. We need to be hearing less howls from the folks that pushed us that way.
You’re talking nonsense as always.
J Watson made a perfectly coherent and well argued point, which you did not refute in any way.
Writing the same rubbish over and over again isn’t going to make it true. I can go back to my comment section and copy and paste a dozen or so rebuttals to his nonsense, if you like.
His response is always “We need more migrants to wipe old people’s bums”.
This from last week…
How are we going to look after 80 million people JW? I know you think that immigrants are “unicorns” (have they become pets?), they never get old, never get sick, don’t have children, don’t commit crime or require other public services. All paid from an endless supply of low skill, low paid, part-time services (think car washes, nail bars, florists etc). The rest of us will either be on welfare, or have an UBI so we can sit indoors smoking weed watching hard core p0rn. It’s just been annouced that we have to build over an area the size of Surrey to accommodate new housing, that’s before the schools, surgeries and other requirements are factored in (energy, waste disposal, sewage etc). Just think of the catastrophic damage to the environment. Maybe we can allocate more land for solar panels and wind farms from the National Parks and AONBs? Or we can used to the idea of shanty towns, next to the pro-immigration, privately policed gated communities in this mid century Utopia of yours. Keep repeating the appeal to emotion fallacy, the only argument you have. Twenty wasted years, that’s right twenty wasted years… when we should have weaned ourselves off this dependency. That’s the thing about drugs (like ideologies), best not to take them in the first place.
‘Fewer howls’. It’s only ‘less’ if you can’t count it. State education, eh?
Eh? It used to be held that “fewer” applied to countable objects (which would include “howls”) and “less” to continuous quantities such as fluids or powders. But this “rule” was essentially invented in the first place, and it is now generally accepted that “less” is acceptable in either case, just as “more” is. Maybe “less howling” might have been a more elegant way of expressing it!
I just get the impression that you’re almost dying to make this kind of point!.
If they’re low earners (which far too many are) then you have to take into account future liabilities such as pensions and healthcare. Don’t forget also that half of London social housing is now used by foreign born people, which means the taxpayer indirectly has to pay more to house the native born citizens who would otherwise be using those properties.
If immigration was such a boon then why hasn’t GDP per capita climbed for the last 20 years?
You need to read the OBR report BB. It outlines migration crucial where a population is aging. Someone has got to pay for your pension and the services you and I will need in later life.
Now as I noted there is a difference between low skilled importation and the average contribution of migrants. Folks need to distinguish. And then remember it is not the fault of the low skilled legal migrants they are here. They have been asked to come and the HO signed off the Visas. We need to be challenging the industries that rely on this much more and grappling with what it’s going to take to jump productivity in those areas. But some of this is v complex.
We also need to not mix up legal with illegal migration. The latter is driven by different dynamics and whilst a significant problem it’s still much less than the legal.
I’m not blaming the immigrants themselves, I’m blaming the various governments that have allowed it to happen.
Some migration is necessary, I don’t think anybody disputes that. However it should be targeted, high skilled/earning and capped at a level society can integrate.
That hasn’t happened which is why people are angry, no amount of waffle will change the fact
We agree. I suspect part of the problem is many of us don’t want the inevitable trade-off, short term at least, and politicians feel stuck constantly having to tell many of us what we’d like to hear rather than what we need to hear.
The solution surely does sound like a sort if madness. Douglas Murray seems to be prescient in his book, “The Slow Suicide of Europe”.
It’s noteworthy that economists have been paddling this prophesy of doom for Japan for decades. The collapse just never really seems to come. It has been said that Japan is a strange economy, however, maybe we have to consider the possibility that mainstream economists are just wrong on some very fundamental things in an age of machines and automation. Labor is simply is not the primary source of wealth anymore. Maintaining living standards in terms of consumer goods seems to be the least of our problem. Housing, education and healthcare are mostly expensive because Western economies seem to misallocate (labor) resources to maintain a huge manegerial bureaucracy and speculative financialized economy instead of things that are actually productive.
Yes but the “indigenous” population is not reproducing itself which is a pretty fundamental issue in many modern societies. So we have a lower and lower proportion of people working to the retired (and other) people who are not. Even a low skilled immigrant is working and paying some taxes, and almost certainly requiring less health treatment than a much older person. (Health care costs are much higher than those of education)
A pensioner like myself (!), however deserving on his past contribution to society, is by definition contributing much less today. People used not to have pensions, after a certain age they were fundamentally surplus to requirements and died pretty soon after finishing work if the work didn’t kill them itself.
Of course pension ages can be increased and we can get more people off benefits, which will help, but there will be great political resistance to this. It is interesting that in Europe many of the right wing parties, particularly the RN, don’t really want to face up to this fundamental issue, perhaps became they would probably lose support if they did.
Another way out of this conundrum might be a much greater level of productivity -.and automation – but this lament has been sung in Britain for decades, without achieving much success. Again, there is tremendous political opposition to any practical measures to improve productivity. The public sector is pretty appalling but the private sector not much better. We are almost addicted to low skilled, low pay labour.
Streuth, look at chart 4.13 on page 108 of the OBR’s report: https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/Fiscal-risks-and-sustainability-report-September-2024.pdf
The average resident is only a net contributor between the ages of 46 and 80.
The average low-wage immigrant is a net recipient of benefits at every age.
Only average high-wage immigrants are net contributors throughout their lifetimes.
Sorry duplicate post, my comment is below.
This is probably the strongest argument I’ve read on the comments. It’s not that low paid immigrants are intentionally not paying into the system, it’s just that they don’t earn enough to be a net plus.
So how do you fix it? If you stop low paid immigration you would have a shortfall of workers. If you try and get the native population to fill those jobs instead wouldn’t the same economic problem still exist- they would also be a net negative.
So you could either pay low skilled workers more, or reduce the threshold at which you pay tax.
Or maybe you could create enough new well paid jobs to offset the low paid ones, creating a total economy net plus.
Any other ideas?
If one strictly qualifies immigrant workers as many more-self-confident countries do, then one can limit the oncosts. Otherwise, if immigration is restricted on the grounds that as an island we will inevitably run out of land on which to house people if we don’t, I would expect the incentive to be more productive will be incentivised; technical innovation, and reduction in non-productive hours spent, the latter typically by the public sector (many of whom have guaranteed unfunded final salary pension schemes, which are prioritised above ALL other government expenditure).
Ok, so your saying we could get out of the hole by increasing productivity? Hasn’t the advent of computing massively increased productivity, if so why are we not seeing the benefit?
If you take that graph at face value it suggests high and mid pay immigrants are the only people, on average, that make a net tax/spend contribution.
Prior to mass immigration starting under New Labour we had a surplus (ie the permanent residents were paying more than was put in). Perhaps that was because the baby boomers were at peak career? Perhaps housing has got now too expensive for the low earners to pay more tax? Why is that?
I’d suggest there’s a lot more in that report being ignored so that the ‘we need more migration’ message is the simplistic message that comes out.
I’d love to have the time to read it fully.
The graph doesn’t separate out the different strata of UK workers as it does for migrants.
Also, though perhaps it’s in the text of the report, it doesn’t give the relative numbers of each income class of migrant worker – are 90% in the low income bracket?
And tax raised isn’t the only contribution people make – a brickie probably doesn’t pay much tax, but the people in the building he builds might do.
This all presupposes that tax must come from income. It is possible to tax wealth or property too.
” …[UK] 14.8 million new immigrants by 2070, which in turn means that, assuming that there is a roughly static population due to low birth rates and ageing, immigrants will go from making up around 15% of the population today to making up around 31% of the population in 2070.”
Thank God I will long be dead and buried by 2070! I just feel very sorry for my children and their children. What an awful place it will be.
I’ll be retiring in 2050s. Is there any guarantee that the immigrant workforce, by that time 30-40% of the population is going to want to pay for the pensions and healthcare of old english people like me?
They could well vote in a government that won’t pay for you.
They will, as Enoch so memorably put it ‘have the whip-hand’.
Who’s the ‘they’ AR? You lumping them all together? Is that the limit of your neuronal capacity?
neuronal capacity
… doesn’t mean what you think it means. Get a dictionary.
Are you suggesting they would have a choice not to pay into the system, if so how?
If as another comment suggests that they could vote in another government that somehow helps them avoid paying in (not sure what party that could be). I would firstly like to know, of the migrants that can actually vote in this country, how many of them actually do so? Secondly they aren’t a monolith, I would argue that migrants from different countries, heck even the same country, don’t all think and vote the same way.
Btw I’m not actually saying I support the ideas mentioned in this article, just questioning this comment.
I suppose by that time large numbers of migrants would have earned a UK pension so it won’t be so a vs b, but those who come for 10 years and then leave might not be happy paying into something that they will get nothing out of. If a British person went abroad and worked somewhere for ten years and then came back, they may well miss out on the full state pension which raises the question about how we structure these state pensions in the age of worker mobility.
Funnily enough there is virtually zero trace of the builders of Stonehedge in our current indigenous DNA. Who’d have thought.
Yes, they were largely replaced. I wonder if they celebrated their near extinction? (However IIRC it’s not near zero, more like 10%).
Celebrated their extinction? There’s a thought!
Perhaps a young generation of neolithic agrarians turned their back on traditional careers in monoliths, so the elders had to import the ‘beakers’ as guest workers to keep the rates of dolmen and menhir erection where it needed to be. Next thing you know, they’re drinking ale out of these funny goblet things rather than traditional animal horns and from there it’s a slippery slope …
An interesting point. I’m genuinely interested, but I have to admit that I am no great genetics expert. Do DNA samples of the Stonehenge builders exist? Is this how we know there is no trace of them in our indigenous DNA? Is there somewhere in the world that they do still exist?
There is now a huge depth of genetic knowledge about the early settlement of the British Isles. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/february/the-beaker-people-a-new-population-for-ancient-britain.html is probably a good place to start but might be out of date now.
I’ve looked it up again now and the 10% I quoted was the proportion remaining a few hundred years after the next lot of people arrived rather than now. Given later migrations it is presumably now a substantially smaller amount.
Sardinians have the greatest proportion of neolithic farmer remaining (the people that the Stonehenge builders belonged to), as high as 50% IIRC (which I often don’t…)
He made that up. There’s no evidence either way.
Yes science has enabled DNA identified in neolithic bone of same age as Stonehedge. It’s v rare in current indigenous population. As DR mentions the current theory is the Beaker people (so called because of a drinking/storage item that is first found in the archaeological record with them) replaced them after a gradual migration across Europe. Quite how and what happened a mystery. Fascinating stuff for sure.
Evidence of plague exposure has now been found in the Bell Beaker People (earlier plague exposure than previously thought), so it’s possible disease played a role in the replacement, as is often the case.
Oh dear, you made that up, didn’t you? We have no idea who built Stonehenge and therefore no way of knowing whether or not we’ve inherited their DNA.
JW is correct on this, there’s a huge amount of genetic data now available.
Nope. People have theories. But there’s no DNA evidence that can be directly linked to the builders of Stonehenge – not least because Stonehenge was not the work of one group in a single era.
If you’re suggesting that the genetics of the precise individuals who moved the stones about are not known then I guess you’re correct. But there’s loads of DNA evidence about the people living in the British isles at that time. The initial builders are referred to as the Early European Farmers. They are replaced a few hundred years after the first stones are put up by the Bell Beaker People, who do some rearrangements of the stones. Both groups appear to live alongside each other for a few hundred years as the EEF decline. Modern British are not significantly descended from the EEF, but are descended from the Bell Beaker People.
at that time
At what time?
Yeah they might not be happy about it, and they could opt out of private pensions, but national insurance is mandatory, which goes into the state pension.
Good question though RE how we structure the pension system in the global age.
It doesn’t just have to be migrants that vote to not support pensioners, any young group of people could vote for such a Govt. Given many can’t afford houses or families and don’t expect to retire themselves, it’s probably fair to say that could be the baseline scenario.
Seems like a more plausible scenario. But it would still be quite a radical change, as older people tend to be more engaged, and therefore catered to, in politics than younger people. But that’s not to say that it couldn’t change in the future.
Well someone will need to.
What’s highly likely though is when you need care in hospital or in a care home in your dotage it’ll be a migrant worker or child of a migrant who provides it. You may have a bit of dementia and be less aware, but remember how kind you were about them when they are helping you.
I think Western economies do not have a shortage but a mismatch of what people are doing and what actually needs to be done. The lockdown strongly hinted at this reality.
In no way in my original comment did I criticise migrants, was horrible to them or said there should be less immigration. You chose to put words in my mouth. You want to rule out any critical analysis of immigration because you are an extremist. How dare you.
JW projects endlessly, (deliberately so).
It should be your kids, if you have kids, who care for you in your ‘dotage’. That’s what the inter-generational contract means.
The possibility of increasing the birth rates of locals by making the idea of having a family more appealing and by reducing the number of unborn babies killed (250,000 last year) doesn’t cross the mind of the government…
I think that leftists realised after the fall of communism in the 90s that the working class doesn’t want to break it’s chains and rise against capitalism, but to work harder and earn more money to improve their status.
After that, there was no hope for a revolution from the local populace, and immigrants unpolluted by capitalism were the new hope for a proletariat that would help bring in the new socialist utopia.
That is why the native, mostly white, working class is now treated with such contempt and even hostility in most western countries by the left, and why this “population replacement” will further increase in the next years.
Evidence suggests that women have abortions because they don’t want to start families because of the high cost. It is this that must be addressed if indigenous fertility is to ne increased. Banning Abortion will only increase the number of unwanted babies who, studies sytongly indicate, will be more likely to lead lives of crime. Better to continue with the current abortion regime and incentivise the right people to reproduce thereby achieving more and better.
Quite. Women (and girls) also have abortions because they can’t afford an (additional) child right now, but perhaps could later, or they already have several. That is what “family planning” largely implies – thankfully the UK’s rate of teen pregnancy, with its associated poor outcomes for children, has plumetted.
The natural decrease of the population after the baby boomer bump should be largely celebrated (among other things it should drive up wages) although it will have negative as well as positive effects (such as having to work longer), as it should gradually return the UK to a sustainable population level where we are no longer heavily dependent on imports and are polluting our environment – particularly watercourses – due to creaking infrastructure.
When populations decline (cf. after any plague in history) it’s usually a bonus for the surviving working people, and birth rates gradually climb again as the financial and physical environment children are born into improves.
White British people don’t want to start families because they’re continually told that everything is their fault, and they’re demoralised.
That, and the fact that they’re being bled white to pay for an entitled bloated public sector.
“unpolluted by capitalism” aren’t people coming here because of the promise of capitalism – to earn more money and improve their status?
I think the native working class is treated with contempt because a large number think the current system isn’t working for them and want a change from the status quo.
How I see it, the ideologies of the two groups you mentioned are the reverse, I could be wrong though.
And how have we made owning one’s own home so one can start a family easier the last 14 years?
Left not been in power until last few weeks (if one can call Starmer left?).
I hazard a guess you’ve not actually given these things a great deal of intelligent thought.
Houses got expensive under New Labour, not 14 years ago.
You people encourage open borders and continuous mass immigration, which ramps up demand for housing while the supply thereof remains largely static. You people are the ones making home ownership and family life more difficult.
Too late. The existing incentives for having children are exploited by immigrant families too a much greater extent than indigenous, for cultural reasons.
I still don’t understand why a worker shortfall needs to be addressed by importing people permanently into British society, particularly when there’s no plan for cultural integration. Surely old-fashioned work permits with expiry dates, along with payment in pounds, would be enough to lure people?
Moreover, are the people in a society simply there to serve the economy, mere fungible producer-consumer units? Or does ancestry, culture, and heritage count for anything at all?
It might also be addressed by not filling the heads of teenagers with nonsense about the benefits of spending three years at university. If you send close to 50% of school leavers to university you are, by definition, sending people of average (academic) intelligence. They may have other abilities which are not being tapped and from which they could earn a decent living. But this is only part of the picture. With an ever-declining manufacturing base, compounded by net zero madness pushing up the cost of making anything, the only jobs available will be low level service ones. These will only be attractive to people for whom this represents a step up in their standard of living, i.e. low skilled, poor immigrants. It’s a set of interconnected Ponzi schemes and I don’t see it getting better.
You seem to have completely missed that one of the only ways out of this is going to be technological. If Sichaun province in China has 30k engineering Graduates per annum, you might have a point about the type of course but not about the need for a much better trained and skilled workforce. That’ll need pump-priming.
Hence my point that young people may have abilities that are not developed by doing a pointless degree at a third rate university. Likewise, if we continue to erode our manufacturing base (which includes engineering and other technology), we lose the places where innovation and work based training happen. So what was your point?
Wrong again, I’m afraid.
In ten years it will only be genius level humans who can compete with AI in disciplines like engineering. We need a generation of young people who are self-reliant, physically accomplished and entrepreneurial – qualities the current educational system does it’s best to extirpate in favour of producing whiny, self-pitying narcissists.
In most instances universities are a middle class perk we no longer need or can afford. Convert them to affordable housing. Bright kids already educate themselves and not-so-bright kids need to develop non-academic skills.
Middle class perk? Like your elite US Graduate education then. Albeit I’m never that sure you got good value for money.
There is though I suspect some small agreement an element of our education and training system needs to be refocused.
Like your elite US Graduate education then.
I got my degrees more than twenty years ago when they were still tickets to well-paid employment. That’s not true now.
Yep, Singapore imports large numbers of workers on temporary visas. Skilled and unskilled. They are granted no rights, no right to remain, and their employer has to see they leave the country within three days of their contact ending or face prison. And they have no shortage of people wanting to work there.
It can be done if there is a will.
Works whilst market assumption is the place is attractive. Be careful what you wish for. By time we are in our dotage we may be desperately marketing for them to come!
We should be saving to fund our own retirements. Not clinging on in quiet desperation hoping someone else is going to bail us out. Perhaps there’s a word we could use for that … sustainability ?
No chance of this government taking us along that road though. We already know that “workers” (or is it “working people” ?) don’t include savers, since they’ve already told us that part. Quite how people get the money to save without working is the bit they haven’t explained yet !”
Immigrant workers in Singapore are granted no rights, can be kicked out at the drop of a hat, yet there is no shortage of willing workers. The UK could and should do the same.
Singapore has been a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society since its inception, which was roughly 75 years ago or so. It is very siloed and has limited historical heritage or longstanding traditions of its own.
This is why they accept a quarter to a third of their population being expats or migrants. These numbers are not transferable to Britain. We are a totally different society, with a different history and heritage.
You miss the point. Immigrant workers in Singapore are granted no rights, can be kicked out at the drop of a hat, yet there is no shortage of willing workers. The UK could and should do the same.
The nature of migration, and how many might qualify for citizenship and related benefits, could vary. But the demographic trend certainly shows significant migration to generate revenues to pay for an aged population has some inevitability. Currently lots want to come. Let’s hope it’s still the case when you need them contributing to your support.
Or increase productivity? Why has productivity flatlined after the GFC? Is immigration part of the reason for that? Is it economic policy? Why is the birthrate of people already here so low? Would it help to ask these questions rather than just say we need more migrants?
I think you may be confusing cashflow with profit.
You may (or may not) get a short term cashflow boost through immigration (YMMV – depends very much on the quality – something over which we appear to have no control these days). However, this all ignores the longer term liabilities being built up when non-working dependent rock up as well. And then they retire expecting pensions for which they will never have contributed enough to fund.
Most of us can spot a population Ponzi scheme when we see one.
If we had a reasonable level of high quality immigration, you might have a case. But that simply isn’t the case. And there’s no chance of it becoming so either.
This argumentment is wrong. Yes more immigration could increased GDP. IT will also increase tax and borrowing- and reduce GDP per capita- unless every migrant pays more tax than they and their family cost the state (currently £17,000 a year each).
“That is, Labour is the first of probably many governments to lead Britain into a period of managed decline.” Bulls#it!
Phoney Blair’s Labour government was the first of all the governments that followed to lead Britain into a period of managed decline. The metric to look at is real terms (ie taking account of inflation) GDP per capita.
All 2 tier Kier Stalin is doing is accelerating the decline by allowing our country to continue to be flooded with low skilled workers (if population decline means fat people need to get off their backsides to get their own McDonalds, I am all for it) and his insane net zero drive which is just going to bankrupt public finances whilst driving up costs and therefore inflation for everyone.
Yes I noticed thatvstatement. I’m pretty sure the UK has been talking about managed decline since the 50s.
We certainly had our ups and downs since WW2 and the dismantling of the British empire. But the terminal decline was introduced by Blair (who inherited a golden legacy from John Major thanks to us crashing out of the ERM) when he opened the flood gates to immigration whilst deindustrialising the north in favour of financial services in London and parts of the south east.
The dogma that we have a shortage of labor in advanced post-industrial societies could be the biggest goof of the modern age. Some recent scientific publications actually did not find the problems mainstream economists are predicting for countries with declining and aging populations, in countries where that already happened. See, for example, a publication from Theodore P. Lianos et al. (2023).
The problem seems to be some very fundamental mistakes in mainstream economic thinking. It might not be a lack of supply advanced economies are suffering from, it is a lack of demand because consumerism is already maxed out. We have a massive capacity to produce more than we need already, that is simply not the problem. Moroever, we tax labor but not parasitical capital exacerbating the ‘problems’ like national debt and weak demand. To hide this state of ‘secular stagnation’ Western economies tend to focus on hyper-financialization. But this is just a smoke screen. Do we really believe legions of consultants and managers bring wealth?
So it might be that it’s not that we do not have enough workers, we simply waste energy on things that only add value in a paper reality.
“The problem seems to be some very fundamental mistakes in mainstream economic thinking.”
A lot of problems are exactly that.
I am not sure you need even that much science to work it out. 9.6m working age people are economically inactive, about 1.7m of those foreign born, so why the hell do we need more unskilled immigration?
Somewhere out there is a system that doesn’t require quarterly growth to remain healthy. Remember that feudalism ruled for centuries, and then it didn’t. And before feudalism there were other ways.
Having lived through the “stagnant” 70s, I can tell you that the investor class suffered far more than the rest of us. Maybe a bit of stagnation wouldn’t be so bad.
“…The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has published a report showing that unless something drastic changes…”
Has not The Office for Budget Responsibility heard of the Singularity? I mean that’s no less unlikely than the OBR’s projections.
And this morning the High Court has decided, apparently following the Horse Hill ruling in the Supreme Court, that a proposed deep coal mine in Cumbria should not proceed. The Labour government withdrew its defence in the case, but the developers fought on nonetheless and lost to Friends of the Earth et al.
So it is now essentially impossible to develop any energy resources in this country other than wind, solar and tidal – i.e. those approved by Friends of the Earth.
The legacy of extreme feminism, abortion and just plain selfishness. And it’s not just the UK.
Have some damn babies! The whole issue would be moot if there were more children to address the economy and lessen the need for immigration. Teach everyone again that children are literally the future. Stress it every single day
Make it a priority from the get go. Give large baby bonuses. Make it a cultural norm again rather than everyone going their single separate lives.
Make every venue, entertainment and place not only kid friendly but encouraged!
The solution isn’t difficult, the path is.
Unless the productivity problem can be reversed. That requires the return of manufacturing on a reasonable scale.
Well, if you must have mass immigration you should find better immigrants. I suggest Spanish speaking Central and South Americans. Here in the US they tend to quickly learn the language, find work, start businesses and settle down to have kids. Also they tend to be “personable”; not necessarily friendly (that would be a bit weird), but they look you in the eye, say hello and whatever sense of superiority they harbor they keep to themselves.
Also no beheadings; that’s important in a good neighbor.
Immigrants choose where they want to go, usually because there are established links or pre-existing communities.
The UK traditionally had two streams of Latin American migration: via the EU (Colombians and others with Spanish passports, Venezuelans and others with Italian passports, and so on) and via universities and language study (Brazilians and others got student visas, and then either transferred onto work visas, married UK residents, or overstayed).
One of these streams (EU) is now closed. I suspect we’ll still have Latin Americans coming over to study but it’s not going to be a huge influx. The communities are all concentrated in London, which is an expensive city.
Meanwhile, commonwealth nationals have far more routes into the country and pre-existing links so we are stuck with these types of migrants over any other.