We are winning the argument (again)

A member of the expert class breaks rank

---

Matt Goodwin’s newsletter goes to 82,900 subscribers from 181 countries. Like our stuff? Then become a paying supporter. Help us while gaining access to exclusive posts, the archive, events, discounts, comments and support independent writers making a difference. Join us on YouTube, Insta, TikTok, X and Facebook.

---

In recent months, I have shown you how people like us, from the forgotten majority, are steadily winning the argument.

Particularly when it comes to highlighting the disastrous effects of mass immigration, this newsletter has been ahead of the curve, outflanking members of a ruling class who refuse to accept the new reality.

That’s why so many people read us, of course. Because they know we’re not only sharing an opinion —we are sharing evidence, data, and information that directly challenge the dominant and dreary consensus among elites in the West.

And now another example of how we are ahead of the debate has arrived, with a renegade member of the expert class breaking rank to make the same point as us —mass immigration is definitely NOT the answer to the looming demographic crisis in the West.

And this is no ordinary member of the expert class.

David Miles CBE is Professor of Financial Economics at Imperial College London and member of the Office for Budget Responsibility.

He has advised countless government bodies and is considered a high-status insider, somebody who is taken seriously by the establishment.

And what has Miles just said?

Well, he’s said something that blows a hole in one of the most popular narratives among the out-of-touch, insular, and fanatically pro-immigration elite class.

Speak to anybody in this class about Britain’s looming demographic crisis—about the fact we are a rapidly ageing society with a declining birth rate— and they will tell you the answer to this crisis is … yep, you guessed it… more immigration!

That the only way we can support our rapidly ageing society is by flooding Britain with record amounts of net migration, without which our economy and society, they confidently claim, would collapse.

But not so fast, says Miles, who has been looking at the same data and trends we have been pointing to for months.

Relying on an increasing population to expand the economy “could not be sustained”, he points out, as the number of people you would need is enormous.

Immigrants, furthermore, consume public services —especially as they get older, have children, bring relatives into the country, and become eligible to claim billions in benefits, which many of them do.

It is, in other words, a giant Ponzi scheme of the sort that would make corrupt financier Bernie Madoff proud.

Even if it might bring about a short-term boost, this fiscal benefit, warns Miles, would quickly fade because migrants get older, too, and so holding the structure of Britain’s population steady while managing the balance between the elderly and workers requires a population that is constantly and rapidly growing.

Before setting out exactly why this makes no sense whatsoever consider what Miles has to say in his own words:

“Today’s young people are tomorrow’s old people, so fiscal benefits fade. And the rise in the population needed to completely offset ageing in demographic structure is very great and gets bigger over time. It could not be sustained.”

In fact, after crunching the numbers, shockingly, Miles estimates that Britain would need 20 million young migrants if it was to balance the country’s growing divide between its rapidly rising number of pensioners and smaller number of workers.

Adding 20 million people over the next forty years, or taking the population to around 100 million by the year 2064, he points out, is clearly unsustainable.

Just think what this might mean for things like our already huge housing crisis, congestion, the environment, health service, and social cohesion.

In fact, I’d go even further by saying such a policy would be completely and utterly insane —a recipe for guaranteed chaos, if not societal collapse.

It would represent what analysts call a ‘Population Trap’, whereby a population expands at such a pace and scale that the state is simply no longer able to fulfil its core functions, such as controlling its borders, providing housing, healthcare, and maintaining the rule of law. Everything, in short, starts to steadily break down.

Furthermore, as Miles goes on, flooding the country with millions of migrant workers would not improve living conditions and prosperity. Far from it.

It’s something called ‘GDP per capita’, not population growth, that really matters for people’s average living standards and there is currently little if any evidence that putting the population on steroids boosts it.

On the contrary, despite what Tony Blair, Fraser Nelson, most economists and the morally righteous expert class like to argue, for much of the last thirty years the imposition of mass immigration coincided with noticeably sluggish if not declining rates of GDP per capita —something they would all rather we avoid.

Indeed, while they like to ignore this, even the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) recently concluded that the many low-wage migrants Boris Johnson and now Keir Starmer have ushered into Britain are generating huge fiscal costs at all ages.

Each low-wage, low-skill migrant produces a fiscal deficit that the UK taxpayer has to pay of some £500,000 by the time they turn 80 years, or some £1 million should they live to age 90. Just think about that.

None of it, in short, makes any sense at all, which is why senior members of the expert class, like David Miles, are now also calling it out. Because they see what we see.

So, what’s a better way forward?

A much better policy than continuing with mass uncontrolled immigration, notes Miles, would be to find ways of getting the many millions of British people who are out of work and relying on welfare, especially younger Britons, back into work:

“The fiscal benefits of raising the incomes of those who are born in the UK and who might be on a trajectory of consistently below average wages”, writes Miles, “are as great as the benefits of having more people come and stay in the UK with average or, especially, well above average earnings.”

This, he argues, would have just as much impact as flooding the country with young migrant workers and, even if he does not say this bit himself, come with the additional advantage of avoiding many other problems that accompany mass migration, such as undermining social cohesion, eroding public trust in the system, increasing crime, and exacerbating the housing crisis.

To that, I would add having leaders who also grasp the importance of developing and promoting aggressive pro-family policies for British people and bringing about a much wider cultural shift in this country, much like we have seen with issues like smoking and the environment.

We need, in short, to urgently create a policy and cultural mix that generates real and meaningful incentives for British families to have more children, while getting millions of British people back into the labour market and creating new incentives for business to prioritise them.

The answer to our looming demographic crisis, in short, as more and more people like David Miles are starting to realise, is not to press down even harder on the broken pedal of mass immigration but get as many British people back to work as possible while looking for new ways to boost birth-rates among the British.

This is the way toward building a more united, cohesive and prosperous nation-state, not more of the chaos and carnage that we see emerging around us today.

---

---