They say “demography is destiny”. Well, Britain’s demography is in the process of changing, quite dramatically.
It’s time we paid more attention to it.
Consider the figures released by the Office for National Statistics today which provide the latest update of the UK population.
They show that the overall level of the population rose to 68.3 million by the middle of 2023.
But the really important detail here is to be found beneath the surface.
Consider, first of all, the rate at which that number is changing. For it turns out that in that past year it rose by 0.98%.
That might not sound like much, but it’s actually the single biggest annual increase in the UK population since 1948.
That is a big deal – a very big deal. But even more intriguing is what’s contributing to that change.
Normally one of the biggest determinants of changes in population is what’s going on with the “natural population”. How many babies are being born and how many people in the country are dying?
In the UK that number (births minus deaths) has almost always been in positive territory.
But in 2023 that changed: the number of births was smaller than the number of deaths. The upshot was that the “natural population” fell.
Indeed, it fell at a faster rate than ever before in modern history.
Which of course raises the question: what is responsible for that record increase in the overall population? And by now you have probably guessed the answer: migration, which in net terms was 677,254 in 2023.
Now in some senses that’s old news: we already knew that net migration was at record levels.
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What is genuinely new is that that net migration wasn’t just part of the explanation for higher population growth; it was the entire explanation for population growth.
And not just any population growth – the highest population growth in more than three-quarters of a century.
That’s totally unprecedented. And whatever your thoughts about migration – and the demographics of the UK – it’s a salient fact that deserves to be debated more.
