The Great Migration Fannywobble
Net migration collapsed, the right got what it wanted, and somehow they became even angrier.
Last week, around this time, I remember turning to my husband and saying, “Husband Bear, oh, how I wish to feel the warmth of the sun on my pallid skin again, woe, look how translucent I am!”
I couldn’t help but feel a malaise that had overtaken me at what, at that point, had felt like years without feeling anything but slightly chilled and slightly damp. Wistfully thinking about warm breezes blowing over my skin and calming my soul out of the 17 months of winter that we had.
I think it is fair to say that I got my wish - and as ever, with getting what you want, I am deeply, deeply disappointed!
Summer arrived with an almighty bang last week Friday, helpfully just in time for the Late May Bank Holiday, which had all of us by Wednesday last week positively gagging for our shorts, not really knowing what we were letting ourselves in for. To say I am sweating would be a dangerous understatement - and I don’t think sweating even covers it. I’m exuding. I started cooking dinner last night, and honestly, just gave up half way. Sandwiches were had.
That’s the hazard with wishing for things and getting them though, right? And we saw that play out all over the political spectrum just this week with the publication of migration figures for 2025.
If you haven’t seen them yet, they are… interesting.
Looking at the headline figures, they are down. And I mean down-down. Net migration decreased to about 171,000 people, which is the lowest since around 2012 outside of the COVID years - and very steeply down from the 906,000 that we saw in 2023.
Breaking these numbers down, on the incoming side (immigration) we had:
Non-EU Nationals: +627,000
EU Nationals: +76,000
British Nationals: +110,000
While on the outgoing side, we had:
Non-EU Nationals: -278,000
EU Nationals: -118,000
British Nationals: -246,000
The breakdown was reasonably consistent with previous years, showing that the largest number of incoming migrants were here for the purposes of study1 at 47%, and the lowest, predictably, through humanitarian safe routes at about 4% of all incoming migration.
Now, with such massive changes in the numbers, with net migration really plummeting hard you would expect the likes of Reform UK to be positively effervescent with glee, wouldn’t you? You would expect, people like Robert Generic Jenrick, to be pompously proclaiming that the people finally, now, have what they want, right?
Oh, my sweet summer child.
While these are reasonable expectations when it comes to the expected responses from people who have been calling for immigration levels to drop for years upon years, that presumes a certain level of honesty for what these people actually stand for. And they are not honest.
Because what we saw were fannywobbles. Big old, massive, weapons-grade fannywobbles.
The problem, it turns out, was not actually the number - because it was never the number.
If it had been the number, this week would have been victory lap territory. Farage would have been levitating three feet above Clacton. The Tories would have been releasing commemorative mugs. The Telegraph would have commissioned twelve identical columns from men called Charles explaining that Britain had finally rediscovered its spine.
Instead, almost immediately, the conversation changed, and not very subtly, either. One moment the national obsession was supposedly that “too many people are coming here”, and the next the outrage machine had abruptly pivoted to: “too many British people are leaving.”
Jenrick led the charge, solemnly informing the nation that 246,000 Britons had left the UK last year. “A city the size of Watford,” he declared, as though Watford itself had been loaded onto a barge under cover of darkness and floated into the North Sea.
“The Starmer Exodus,” apparently.
Now, this is fascinating for a number of reasons, not least because many of the same people currently clutching their pearls over British emigration have spent years talking about moving abroad as though it were the pinnacle of aspirational living. Expats, we are told, are worldly. Sophisticated. Adventurous. The sort of people who “summer” as a verb.
Migrants, meanwhile, are apparently dastardly civilisation-ending invaders arriving specifically to steal Derek from Doncaster’s final remaining GP appointment.
Now suddenly, when British people move abroad, migration itself becomes a national tragedy. A wound. A crisis. The end of Britain as we know it.
So what exactly is the proposed policy here? Forced repatriation? Reform-branded tugboats cruising around Dubai Marina rounding up tax exiles and Telegraph columnists? Is Jenrick planning to personally drag Isabel Oakeshott back through Heathrow by the sleeve of a linen jumpsuit while shouting “British jobs for British podcasters”?
Which is the point where the whole thing starts collapsing under the weight of its own hypocrisy. Because if immigration was really about numbers, this week would have been cause for celebration among the anti-immigration crowd. The numbers came down. Sharply. The thing they said they wanted happened.
But the anger remained, and that’s incredibly revealing. Because it shows that this was never really a technocratic debate about sustainable migration levels, workforce planning or infrastructure capacity. If it were, the conversation would now be shifting toward balance, long-term planning and economic trade-offs.
Instead, the goalposts immediately sprinted into the distance wearing a fake moustache. The problem was never simply that people were moving. The problem was which people were moving.
Because the British right has always spoken about migration using two entirely different moral frameworks depending on who is doing it.
When wealthy Britons move abroad, they are “expats”. Adventurous free spirits with global mindsets and suspiciously strong opinions about inheritance tax. When foreign nationals move here to study, work, pay taxes, staff hospitals or care for elderly people, they become “migrants”, spoken about as though they arrived personally carrying the collapse of Western civilisation in a wheelie suitcase.
That distinction is doing an enormous amount of work.
Migration, in reality, is not one thing. It is students. Doctors. Engineers. Care workers. Families. Refugees. Academics. Construction workers. Retirees. Entrepreneurs. People following jobs. People fleeing wars. People falling in love. People trying to survive.
The politics of the far-right, however, depends on flattening all of that complexity into one vague, threatening image: foreigners arriving to take what is yours.
Your wages. Your housing. Your GP. Your culture. Your country.
It is an argument built almost entirely on emotional suggestion. A permanent state of national side-eye, and once you really notice that, the rest of it starts making a lot more sense.
If the concern were genuinely about pressure on public services, these people would spend at least some of their time discussing the systematic underfunding of those services.
If the concern were genuinely about wages, they might occasionally mention stagnant pay, exploitative labour practices or the collapse of collective bargaining.
If the concern were really about the economy stagnating, they would now and then mention Brexit’s role in this.
If the concern were genuinely about housing, they might have noticed that Britain stopped building enough homes years ago.
Instead, somehow the blame always lands in exactly the same place.
Never the landlords. Never the ministers. Never the hedge funds buying up housing stock. Never the people who campaigned for Brexit2. Never the governments that gutted local councils, hollowed out infrastructure and spent fifteen years treating public services like an optional hobby.
Always the migrant - the person lower down the ladder.
There is also a cost to this drop in migration that has to be mentioned - and it will affect people in very real ways. As it stands, around 42% of licensed doctors in the UK trained abroad, and in new NHS registrants, that figure is close to 68%.
Around one in five staff working in the NHS hold a non-UK nationality. A UNISON survey done in April this year found that 43% of the international workforce in the NHS are now actively considering leaving the UK - that would work out to about roughly 8% of the overall workforce of 1.2 odd million people taking their things and saying an emphatic “ciao!” And it’s not because their circumstances have changed - it’s because the atmosphere has.
Around 23% of the respondents now feel unwelcome in the country, while 19% feel unsafe on the back of the constant anti-migrant rhetoric that’s been doing the rounds. The care worker visa, which brought in people to look after our elderly parents and most vulnerable adults and children, has now effectively been closed.
The governments proposed solution to the very ongoing and very severe care crisis won’t be anywhere near ready until at least 2028.
These are not abstract economic trade-offs. These are the predictable, foreseeable consequences of years of political rhetoric that treated an entire category of human being as a problem to be solved - and the people who will suffer most are not the politicians who ran on it, but the patients on the waiting lists and the elderly people in understaffed care homes.
Racism, in modern British politics, rarely announces itself honestly anymore. It does not usually arrive screaming slurs in the street. It arrives presenting polling data and euphemisms. It talks endlessly about “legitimate concerns” and “cultural fit” and “integration”, while somehow reserving its greatest suspicion for people who look, sound or pray differently.
And once you strip away all the graphs, slogans and fannywobbling, what you are left with is not really an economic argument at all.
It is hierarchy. It is grievance. It is plain old textbook racism.
The numbers fell and the anger stayed exactly where it was.
That is the tell. That is the whole bloody game.
Which, I would remind you at this stage, props up our university sector in a very big way and is a form of non-permanent migration as this cohort is not eligible a route to settlement unless they stay on by getting a job.
And apparently got paid £5m for doing so.
There is another concern that I have about the labels used in grammatical terms. As I understand my own main language, an immigrant is someone who migrated from his or her country with the intention of making the UK their permanent residence. A migrant does the same except without the intention of permanence. Our government is busy trying to make it harder to gain permanent residence and that sets up a huge part of our workforce, and their children, to be so badly treated or insecure that they will migrate to a country that welcomes their labour and tax contributions. The UK is almost entirely populated by people descended from immigrant ancestors but historically mainly white. Yet, if we look at our summer habit of sunbathing, we are obsessed with trying to get browner at the same time as many of us spout racist colour prejudice against the races our sun tan tries to emulate. Migration handled properly is a good thing that should be encouraged. In my experience, the work ethic of an immigrant is something our children should be encouraged to acquire.
It was never about the numbers, and always about the vibes. This won't stop until the people feel less angry, and they will never feel less angry, because their leaders win when they feel angry. Take a lesson from MAGA. Restored to power, spearheading one of the most brutal deportation programs in history, they are not satisfied and won't be satisfied.