UK population explosion – “If our MPs don’t ‘get it’ after reading these reports, they never will”
Uncontrolled immigration : 11 million reasons the British public will not let their politicians off the hook
Uncontrolled immigration : 11 million reasons the British public will not let their politicians off the hook
Montage © Facts4EU.Org 2025
New series : The definitive population and immigration numbers, plus shocking facts on benefits, unemployment, deportations, ethnicity, age and gender
These reports make clear in graphic terms how serious the UK’s immigration and population crisis really is. Part I today summarises where we are and how we got here.
A major Brexit Facts4EU.Org series
Immigration and the UK's Population Explosion
PART I (this report) - 11 million reasons the public won’t let the UK’s politicians off the hook on immigration
PART II - Immigration and ethnicity – employment, inactivity, benefits, age and gender disparities
PART III - Immigration and crime – the offending statistics troubling the public
PART IV - Hotels, hostels, barges, or camps? And benefits – what are we offering migrants to come to the UK?
PART V - EU's effect on UK immigration, deportations, challenges of the ECHR, the UN, and our politically-active courts
PART VI - The main party leaders comment on our reports
We plan to cover all the above topics in the coming days and weeks, in between our reports on newsworthy events.
All these facts have never before been presented so starkly and we hope as many politicians as possible will read the reports and take in our ‘at-a-glance’ charts.
Politicians who have failed to address the huge rise in levels of immigration and its effects – in Government and in Opposition - are increasingly being called upon by the voting public to account for their responses over the years as to how this problem has become so severe.
They are also being asked what they now plan to do about this.
Part I : Just how bad the immigration and population crisis really is, in cold, hard numbers
Today’s report lays out the simple facts about the UK’s massive population growth over time. Almost all of the huge rise is due to uncontrolled immigration.
Below we have used the best official set of data there is (from the ONS) to show how the UK’s population has increased dramatically over the last 50 years. As we have stated repeatedly for 10 years, we believe the ONS’s numbers are understated, but these are the ‘best’ official figures we have to work on.
We have broken down the 50-year period into five, 10-year periods. These clearly highlight how the official population has rocketed by nearly 11 million people. Crucially, this analysis shows that more than 70% of the UK’s population explosion has taken place in just the last 20 years.
Brexit Facts4EU.Org Summary
How the UK’s population has exploded mostly due to immigration in the last 50 years
- To 1983 : +80,100
- To 1993 : +1,304,600
- To 2003 : +1,774,600
- To 2013 : +4,188,300
- To 2023 : +3,645,700
- Total increase : 10,993,300
- Of which, increase in last 20 years : 7,834,000 (71.3%)
© Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2025 - click to enlarge
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Here is what the above increases have done to the UK’s population over 50 years
With nearly 11 million people being added to the national population, we show how this has translated into the estimated population numbers each year. We have also depicted some of the various Prime Ministers who governed the country. The serious increase started with Tony Blair, who became PM in 1997.
Brexit Facts4EU.Org Summary
The growth in the UK’s population in the last 50 years
- 1973 : 56.2m
- 1983 : 56.3m
- 1993 : 57.7m
- 2003 : 59.6m
- 2013 : 64.1m
- 2023 : 68.3m
© Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2025 - click to enlarge
[Source : Office for National Statistics.]
The Tony Blair Affair
Given the time lag between policies being discussed and implemented - and their effects being felt - there is a clear link between the start of the new, open immigration policies of Tony Blair and the subsequent population explosion.
Following the governments of Mr Blair and then Mr Brown, neither the coalition government of Cameron-Clegg nor the subsequent Conservative governments of Theresa May, Boris Johnson or Rishi Sunak abided by their clear pledges to reduce the immigration levels dramatically. We have not included Liz Truss in this list as she was not in office long enough to effect any changes. The results of these collective failings are clear to see in our chart above.
Compared to today, previous immigration ‘crises’ pale into insignificance
The UK has always had immigration surges. Wars are typical instigators of mass immigration and there are many more examples besides. For instance, older readers will remember the ‘Ugandan Asians’ crisis of 1972.
This dominated British headlines for months, after the brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin announced on 04 August 1972 that all Asians in Uganda had just 90 days in which to leave the country. Some 29,000 Ugandan Asians held British passports and the Foreign Office suddenly found itself having to honour its obligations to these people. On 18 September 1972 the first evacuation flight duly landed at London’s Stansted Airport carrying 193 passengers.
Precise numbers are not available but the best estimates put the total influx of immigrants from the Ugandan crisis at circa 29,000. To put this into today’s context, this represents just 3% of the total net immigration into the UK in 2023. Put another way, more immigrants entered the UK in 2023 in only 12 days than in the whole duration of the ‘Ugandan Asian crisis’.
Hidden in plain sight
No official UK body can state with any degree of certainty how many people live, work, study, or have any other lifestyle in the United Kingdom. The best we have are estimates of decidedly varying quality and reliability.
This is even more true when seeking to discover the breakdown of any of these estimates according to a range of criteria which have long been of interest to the public. One such is that of immigration and the composition of the population according to basic classifications of country of birth, ethnicity, employment and benefit status, gender, criminal actions, etc. In the 1970s and 1980s it could be argued that this was not of major importance because whatever that make-up was, it had not been changing much over time. Then along came Tony Blair.
We will have more to say about Mr Blair when we look at the EU's impact on immigration in a subsequent part of this series.
Observations
After decades of fairly predictable numbers based on the 10-yearly census and the reporting of data derived from official surveys - and attempts to collate figures from whatever annual records existed - the traditionally stable UK population picture began to change. Increasingly there was a need and a desire to quantify these changes. Within a short period, the records and measurements that existed were found to be completely unfit for purpose, and to this day the various official bodies are scrambling to catch up.
The impact of this is becoming more severe each year. Without knowing how many more people were effectively long-term UK residents, how could it have been possible to plan the number of schools, GPs’ surgeries, hospitals and other essential parts of national infrastructure that were required? And without any realistic idea of the number of immigrants who had entered the country legally but were now overstaying their visas and who had no intention of leaving, how was it even possible to determine the number of immigration officers that were required to find, detain, and ultimately send these people back whence they came?
The population increase in the last 50 years represents a rise of more than 21%. The geographical boundaries of the country have not changed. Regrettably the infrastructure within the country has not kept pace. But the UK is now carrying over 20% more passengers.
As an analogy, where four people used to sit comfortably inside the typical British saloon car in 1973, today a fifth person has been squeezed in. We hope our reports will prove useful in shedding some light on the consequences and might even result in some action finally being taken…
As we said in our headline : “If our MPs don’t ‘get it’ after reading these reports, they never will”
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[ Sources: ONS | HMRC | HoCL ] Politicians and journalists can contact us for details, as ever.
Brexit Facts4EU.Org, Wed 29 Jan 2025
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