The message Britain ignored: Why we need migrants
The warning was clear over a decade ago, but Britain failed to listen.
Back in 2014, on the BBC’s Sunday Politics London programme, Andrew Neil was discussing David Cameron’s plan to curb EU migration, a plan driven more by fear than common sense.
Nick Watt, then of The Guardian and now of BBC Newsnight, offered a clear and prescient warning.
“The biggest challenge facing the NHS is two million extra people aged over 70 by 2020.
“How are you going to pay for that? You’re going to pay for that by having young people working and earning taxes.
“And who’s that? It’s immigrants.”
That was also the time Nigel Farage was gaining traction with his poisonous claim that Britain had too many migrants. And it was the time the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, was bending to Farage’s rhetoric by promising fewer EU migrants.
As we now know, Britain needed every one of those EU migrants, and many more besides. The truth was clear even then.
- Britain had a rapidly ageing population.
- A shrinking birth rate.
- And millions more jobs than Britons to do them.
Yet the pro-immigration argument wasn’t properly made in 2014, just as it isn’t being properly made today. If it had been communicated clearly, we could have punctured Farage’s populist nonsense long before the referendum.
We could have avoided the lies that poisoned public debate. We could have avoided Brexit.
Instead, the lies won, and now the architect of Brexit is attempting yet another comeback.
For the avoidance of doubt, Britain needs migrants because we have a growing ageing population, a low birth rate, and far more jobs than we have people to do them.
This is not a complicated message. But because it has never been properly explained, xenophobia has been allowed to flourish and Britain has lost its way.
