Britain's looming demographic CRISIS

Mass immigration, economic decline, or more babies -- time to choose

---

Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 38,000 subscribers across 151 countries, and thousands of paid supporters who make our work possible. Like our stuff? Then help us by becoming a paid supporter and access everything —the full archive, exclusive posts, polling, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, advance notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are not afraid to push back against the grain. You can also join our community on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter/X.

---

With voting in the 2024 UK election underway, I wanted to take the opportunity to publish an exclusive essay by Paul Morland, author of the new book No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children, published today. Paul is a former Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and Senior Member of St Antony’s College, Oxford.

---

It sometimes seems incomprehensible to the British people that the UK’s level of immigration is running at such high and still rising levels.

More than fourteen years after the Conservative Party took office, promising annual immigration would decline to tens, not hundreds of thousands, net migration is now 600,000 a year while gross immigration into Britain is around a million.

While we are often told, erroneously, we are a nation of immigrants this is actually very misleading. By most estimates, Britain has in recent years had more immigration than in the whole period from the Norman Conquest to the Second World War.

And the effects of this seismic change have been enormous.

The share of the population defining itself as “white” in England and Wales fell from 95% in 1991 to 81% in 2021, while the share defining itself as “white British” is now down to 74%. This is the fastest ethnic change the country has ever seen.

If this continues, then the share of the country’s population that identifies as “white British” is forecast to become a minority group around the year 2070.

The % of the UK population that is foreign born, since 1951

Those who oppose these great inflows and do not embrace the rapid ethnic change they cause wonder why it is that politicians seem unable to stop them.

There is much focus on illegal immigration and the small boats in the Channel, which looks set to rise further under a likely incoming Labour government.

But most of the inward movement of people flows from legal, not illegal, immigration, so it’s not just about the difficulty in controlling Britain’s borders.

Which brings me to what this is really all about.

If you really want to understand the looming demographic crisis that is facing Britain and many other Western nations then you simply have to make sense of what I call the ‘demographic trilemma’.

Let me explain what I mean.

And let me explain the one thing we can do to get out of this mess.