ArgumentsBlair’s Reckless Population Explosion Sowed the Seeds of Brexit, Though Few Will Now Admit It
The greatest failure of modern British governance was to encourage mass immigration to the U.K. and fail to prepare for the impact it would have, Philip Johnston writes in The Telegraph. “It is at the root of much that afflicts the nation today, from the agony of Brexit to the near-terminal pressure on the NHS and the housing crisis with all its attendant consequences.” “Bizarrely, political discourse has raged around the creaking NHS, the crowded trains, the snarled up roads, the lack of homes, the crammed prisons, the cost of pensions and the woeful state of social care, all without ever focusing on the cause for fear of being denounced as racist,” he writes, adding: “There were two ways to address this matter. Either stop adding to the population with a policy of net zero immigration. Or accept that the increase was unstoppable, even welcome in view of the fact that we had so many more older, economically inactive people, and ensure the infrastructure was in place to cope.”
The greatest failure of modern British governance was to encourage mass immigration to the U.K. and fail to prepare for the impact it would have, Philip Johnston writes in The Telegraph. “It is at the root of much that afflicts the nation today, from the agony of Brexit to the near-terminal pressure on the NHS and the housing crisis with all its attendant consequences.”
As figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) confirmed this week, the last twenty years have seen the population rise faster than at any time in history. Johnston notes that even though the rate of increase has slowed, the total is due to hit 70 million within a decade, fueled predominantly by immigration, either directly or by the children of recent arrivals.
“Bizarrely, political discourse has raged around the creaking NHS, the crowded trains, the snarled up roads, the lack of homes, the crammed prisons, the cost of pensions and the woeful state of social care, all without ever focusing on the cause for fear of being denounced as racist,” he writes, adding:
There were two ways to address this matter. Either stop adding to the population with a policy of net zero immigration. Or accept that the increase was unstoppable, even welcome in view of the fact that we had so many more older, economically inactive people, and ensure the infrastructure was in place to cope.
Unfortunately, he says, successive governments did neither.
Johnston concludes:
There were many causes of Brexit but historians will surely look at the impact of population growth on public sentiment in England (Scotland’s has hardly changed) and how that fed into an animus against the EU. Of course, some people felt their country was changing but many were aggrieved by a sense that there were now too many people competing for their jobs, access to the NHS, welfare and housing and even seats on trains and buses.
Culpability must lie with Tony Blair’s government. In the 20 years before Labour came to office in 1997, the population rose by 2 million. In the 20 years since it has grown by 8 million. What was done to prepare for this? The seeds of Brexit and today’s political crisis were sown.
