If Number 10 and Number 11 harboured any hopes that attention would stay focused on the measures in the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement they were dashed this morning with the release of the latest immigration numbers.
Immigration looks set to become a central issue in next year’s general election, with the Reform party, run by Nigel Farage‘s friends, starting to make an impact in opinion polls.
Yet it was not the net migration figures for the year ending June 2023 (some 672,000) that grabbed the attention today, but instead, the ONS’s revisions for the year before that bumped 606,000 up to a record-breaking 745,000.
