A baby boom and longer lifespan have pushed up population levels by 408,000 A baby boom and longer lifespan have pushed up population levels by 408,000

An immigrant baby boom is fuelling Britain’s fastest population growth in half a century.

The number of people in the UK has passed 61million for the first time, figures showed yesterday.

Record immigration levels over the past decade have driven up the number of women of childbearing age.

This helped boost the number of births last year to 791,000 – up 33,000 on 2007.

For the first time in a decade, the excess of births over deaths played a bigger role than immigration itself in driving population growth, which is now twice as fast as in the 1990s.

The figures from the Office for National Statistics show that net immigration – the balance of those arriving over those leaving – fell by 44 per cent between 2007 and 2008 as economic turmoil triggered an exodus of foreign workers.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas seized on those figures as proof that Britain’s borders were ‘stronger than ever’ and migration was ‘under control’.

He insisted that previous projections showing the UK population rising to 70million within 30 years were now ‘not true’.

Ignoring the baby boom, Mr Woolas said: ‘Of course it’s the net migration increase that has been worrying people, including me.’

Opposition critics and immigration campaigners reacted with incredulity, pointing out that immigration remains at near-record levels and it is foreign-born mothers who are pushing up the birth rate.

Last month Home Secretary Alan Johnson ruled out any cap on immigration and told MPs he did not ‘lie awake at night worrying about a population of 70million.’ Last month Home Secretary Alan Johnson ruled out any cap on immigration and told MPs he did not ‘lie awake at night worrying about a population of 70million.’

Shadow Immigration Minister Damian Green said last night: ‘Alan Johnson says he doesn’t lose sleep over population growth. Perhaps he should, instead of sleeping on the job.

‘These figures show our population is still rising fast, even when the recession is driving hundreds of thousands to leave.

‘This puts added pressure on housing and transport, and shows that there is still no proper control over immigration.’

The ONS figures showed 61,383,000 people living in the UK in mid-2008. The figure has leapt by two million – equivalent to a city twice the size of Birmingham – in just seven years.

The increase of 408,000 in the 12 months from mid-2007 was the steepest since the baby boom years of the early 1960s.

It represented an annual increase of 0.7 per cent – more than twice as fast as in the 1990s and three times the rate of the 1980s.

Birth rates have been rising over the past decade, with the ONS measure of fertility now standing at 1.96 children per woman, up from 1.63 in 2001 and the highest in almost 40 years.

ONS statisticians said the rising birth rate was partly due to women born in the UK having more children.

While there was ‘no single explanation’ for this, possible causes included women in their 20s choosing to have babies slightly earlier and changes in government policies on maternity leave and tax credits.

However mass immigration has had a greater impact on birth rates, as hundreds of thousands of women of childbearing age have arrived in the UK.

They have boosted the number of potential mothers by two per cent since 2001.

Foreign-born women also have a higher birth rate – 2.51 children compared with 1.86 for UK-born women.

ONS statistician Roma Chappell said 56 per cent of the 33,000 increase in births between 2007 and 2008 was accounted for by the babies of mothers born outside the UK.

Some of these, however, will be of British descent.

Across Britain around one baby in four is now born to a mother from overseas.

In London, the figure rises to 55 per cent, with the highest proportions last year in the boroughs of Newham (75 per cent) and Brent (73 per cent).

Slight falls in the death rate over recent years mean that ‘natural’ population growth – the excess of births over deaths – reached 220,000 in 2007/08.

Net immigration added 186,000 – down from 198,000 the year before.

Earlier this week, separate health figures showed maternity services under severe pressure. Some 4,000 women were forced to give birth outside maternity wards last year due to a lack of midwives and beds.

While the births figure is rising, numbers at the other end of the age scale are also growing. There are now 1.3million people aged 85 or over – more than two per cent of the population.

The ONS immigration statistics for the year to December 2008 showed 512,000 arrivals, down only slightly on the 527,000 figure of the previous year.

But there was a sharp rise in the number of foreign workers leaving the UK.

A total of 395,000 people emigrated, up 24 per cent on the year before. They included 237,000 non-Britons, many of them Poles and other Eastern Europeans.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the MigrationWatch think-tank said last night: ‘It is the usual Government spin to claim these numbers as a success for immigration policy when foreign immigration is virtually unchanged at about half a million a year.

‘What has really happened is that EU citizens have voted with their feet. The number leaving has doubled in the face of the deep recession in Britain. But EU migration is something over which the Government have no control whatever.

‘The bottom line is that the population of the UK will exceed 70million within 25 years even at these levels of immigration.’



East European exodus

The number of Eastern European workers returning home is now nearly as large as the numbers arriving.

Figures show that last year the total number of ‘A8’ citizens coming to Britain from the former Eastern Bloc states slumped by more than a quarter from 109,000 to 79,000.

At the same time the number returning to their homelands more than doubled, from 25,000 to 66,000.

The trend helped drive down net immigration to 118,000, a drop of 44 per cent and the lowest since the expansion of the EU five years ago.

Karen Dunnell, the Government’s chief statistician, said the figures were likely to be due to the economic downturn.

She said: ‘You have to say that probably unemployment and the economic situation, given that quite a lot from the A8 countries are coming to work, is probably having an impact.’

An estimated one million people have flocked to the UK since Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the EU in 2004.

The Government faced fierce criticism at the time for opting to give all new EU citizens free access to UK labour markets, while other major economies imposed strict curbs.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1209396/Population-UK-tops-61million-biggest-baby-boom-generation.html#ixzz0PT19a3Ke

FACTA ON A PLATE

Facts on a plate: our population is at least 77 million

Independent on Sunday, The, Oct 28, 2007 by city eye



It is the statistic that dare not speak its name, though eventually it must. It has huge ramifications for the civil and political life of this country, the health of the equity markets and, most immediately, the residential property market. So don’t forget you read it here first: the population of the UK is presently somewhere between 77 and 80 million.

The 2001 census, already hopelessly out of date and easy to avoid for those who find filling in forms a trifle inelegant, numbered us at a little under 59 million. But as statistics go, that one’s most definitely a damned lie.





My sources for the above statement are good, but scared of admitting the truth for fear of incurring the wrath of Whitehall. It’s like the best way of monitoring illegal drug consumption: forget the pious statements from ministers – the foolproof method is to sample our water and the effluent in it. That’s easily the best way of monitoring what the nation has been consuming.

Consumption – that’s the thing. Based on what we eat, one big supermarket chain reckons there are 80 million people living in the UK. The demand for food is a reliable indicator; as Sir Richard Branson says, you can have all the money in the world but you can only eat onelunch and one dinner.

The supermarket in question was privately lobbying the Competition Commission to let it grow its market share. The argu- ment, reasonably enough, was that the market was far bigger than the regulator realised, so expanding the network was fair.

I have a second, respectable, source. A major, non-commercial agricultural institution reckons there are 77 million of us in the UK. Again, its reckoning is based on what we eat.

That faint background noise you’re hearing as you read this is the sound of everyone slithering off the record. Why? In political terms, standing behind these figures would be to toss a hand grenade into a vat of gasoline. People would be hounded out of a job for scaremongering.

The Office for National Statistics’ figures, published last week, predict a population of 75 million by 2051. It’s an honest estimate but horribly wide of the mark because number counting doesn’t work effectively. If you want to know how many there are of us, ask a food firm.

If the true numbers were revealed, the Little Englanders and xenophobes would come out in force about the evils of immigration. But that’s what made America great in the 19th century, and it’s a driving force of our economy right now. It’s also anti- inflationary.

David Buik, a money manager with broker BGC Partners, was talking of “one million Eastern Europeans unaccounted for in London” on television last week. I suspect he’s right if somewhat conservative in his estimate. How many do you see working in the construction industry and waiting at tables?

And when I say “anti-inflationary”, I mean they are getting rotten wages. Dignified by the term “cheap labour”, the hidden hordes will do well for the services sector, among others. People are assets – to maintain and to be maintained – so we are wealthier as a nation.

All of which is reflected in strong economic demand and markets see-sawing between optimism over what we all see on the streets (that 77 million figure feels right to me) and the possibility of something nasty if the Bank of England credit-crunch prognosis is correct (to echo last week, I think next spring will be unpleasant).

As for housing, property magnates and chief executives of housing associations alike say the expanding population means serious demand for the foreseeable future, credit crunch or no. Next week, I’ll look at the detail of this argument.

Removed E-Mail address,

Now lets take look at what WOOLAS Calls controlled!!

2008

http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefingPaper/document/116

Implications for the UK

12. Five countries account for about half the visa applications to the UK. In 2006/7 China, India, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Russian Federation were the source of 1.22 million applications of the 2.8 million received world wide. In 2005 their combined population was 2890 million. By mid-century it is projected to total 3728 million, an increase of 29%.

13. Meanwhile, the top ten source countries for asylum seekers are currently Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, China, Somalia, Pakistan, North Korea, and Sri Lanka. This list changes over time as conditions in those and other countries change. However, by way of illustration, the population of these countries now comes to 1662 million. By mid century it is projected to reach 2090 million, an increase of 26%.

10 August, 2009

Notes This paper is largely a précis of “The shape of things to come: world population to 2050.” The data have been updated. By Professor D.A. Coleman. A contribution to the Engelsberg Seminar 2005. Published by the Ax::son Johnson Foundation, Stockholm, 2007, in Empire and the Future World Order, pp. 209 – 230.

http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefingPaper/document/163

The Points Based System: Dispelling the Myths

The Points Based System (PBS) is not designed to limit the number of people settling in the UK. Therefore it is completely unlike the Australian system.

According to Government figures, the PBS would have cut net immigration in 2007 by 8%, when a reduction of 75% is required to stop the UKs population hitting 70 million in 2028.

1. Introduction

The Home Affairs Committee issued its report on the Points based system for work permits on Friday 31 July. This note sets out the background.

2. The PBS will not prevent the UKs population hitting 70 million

The Governments own calculation is that, if the PBS had been in operation last year, it would have reduced immigration by 20,000 or 8 % of net immigration of 237,000 in 2007 (the latest available year) [1]. We need a reduction of 75% to hold the population of the UK below 70 million and a 100% reduction to hold it below 65 million compared to the present 61 million, as illustrated in the following diagram:

http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefingPaper/document/162

3. The PBS is completely unlike the Australian system.

The system is quite different from the Australian system as it has no limits and is not intended to have any. This scheme does not limit work-related migration in any way, and is not intended to. The Australian system which it is said to resemble is, in fact, entirely different; it starts with a limit and selects within that total. By contrast, Tier One is entirely open ended. For Tier Two, employers are supposed to make sure that there is no satisfactory candidate within the European Union but this test is notoriously difficult to police. Nor does it apply if an occupation has been declared a “shortage occupation”, nor if the migrant arrives as an intra company transfer.

4. There is no evidence of the economic benefits of large scale immigration.

As unemployment climbs towards three million, the whole justification for a massive system for economic migration comes into question. With a workforce of 30 million, the only long-term answer is to train and retrain British workers. The CBI themselves acknowledged this in their evidence to the House of Lords [2]. Furthermore, the whole concept of skills shortages is dubious, particularly over the medium term. Professor Metcalf, Chair of the government’s own Migration Advisory Committee told the House of Lords Economic Committee that “the whole notion of shortages was a bit of a slippery concept” (Q557), since, over time, wage increases should deal with the shortages. This scheme assumes that there is significant economic benefit to the host country from large-scale immigration. However, House of Lords report in April 2007 came to the opposite conclusion [3].

5. It does not help make British workers more competitive.

The main effect of the scheme will be to open the skilled section of our labour market to competition from overseas, thus reducing the incentive for employers to train British staff. For example, Tier One will be open to any foreign student who has a obtained a Bachelor degree in the UK, is under 28, has stayed on under the International Graduates Scheme and is earning 23,000 a year. As the average starting salary for a graduate in the UK is about 21,000, this is not a high hurdle. These international graduates will be in direct competition with British graduates who will have run up substantial debts acquiring their degrees.

It is noteworthy that all the private sector jobs of working age created since 1997 have gone to foreign born workers.

6. It does not fill gaps in the labour force.

This Government claims to this effect have been completely contradicted by the facts. Since 1997 the number of foreign born workers has doubled to nearly four million, yet the number of vacancies hardly changed from 667,000 between mid 2001 to mid 2008. This is because immigrants fill some jobs but also create new demand which means new jobs. (It has since fallen to 465,000 in Jan 2009 as the recession has developed).

7. Scope for abuse.

At the application stage, the incentive to forge the necessary documents will be huge. At stake is a “meal ticket for life” both for the successful fraudster and his family. The Government claim that “intelligence led” detection methods will be effective but with applications approaching 200,000 a year, that must be dubious. Furthermore, after arrival, there is no guarantee that those granted work permits under Tier Two will actually do (or continue to do) the jobs that they were recruited for. Under Tier One there is not even a requirement that they should do skilled work.

8. Absence of embarkation controls.

This scheme is being brought into effect before border checks on individuals are fully in place. The Home Office are, therefore, in no position to know whether someone granted a work permit has left at the end of it.

9. Difficulties of removal.

Quite apart from the extensive legal and practical difficulties of removing people against their will, the Government has almost no capacity to remove people who are neither foreign prisoners at the end of their sentence nor failed asylum seekers. The Government claim to be removing an immigration offender every 8 minutes is deeply misleading. This number includes those turned away at the border. The number actually being removed after entry is about 1,000 a month or 12,000 a year (excluding foreign national prisoners). Meanwhile, the number of visas issued has risen rapidly in recent years to over 2 million a year. The Government’s removal capacity is less than 1% of this number. Therefore, unless over 99% of those granted visas leave when they are supposed to, despite the absence of any checks, the number of illegals in Britain will climb every year.

10. Complexity.

This will be a huge and complex scheme. There are potentially 26,000 job titles and over 5,000 sponsors. Given that students are included in Tier 4, there could well be half a million applications a year. On past form, the Home Office are most unlikely to have the staff and resources necessary to check on the authenticity of the applicants and their sponsors. The pressure from industry and academia will be to reduce waiting times and backlogs. It could well be only a matter of time before they are simply going through the motions for the sake of appearances, as we have seen so often in the past.

31 July, 2009

Notes

UKBA Press Release 5 Jan 2009 text and Notes to Editors. Note 4 Written Evidence HL paper 82-II Memorandum by the CBI paragraph 2. House of Lords, Select Committee on Economic Affairs, HL Paper 82-1.

SIR ANDREW GREEN – MIGRATION WATCH ON LBC RADIO SAID YESTERDAY- OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS IMMIGRATION HASN’T CHANGED IT STANDS AT JUST OVER 1000 A DAY ENTERING BRITAIN- THE PRESSURES’ ON FOOD-ENERGY-HEALTH – EDUCATION ETC IS IMMENSE- MINISTERS APPEAR TO BE BLIND!!!

POWELL’S PREDICTIONS ARE COMING TO PASS AT A RAPID RATE- OUR MINISTER CARE NOT ONE JOT!!

WHEN A RATHER INNOCENT SOUNDING NEWCASTLE GUY ON RADIO PHONE IN LAST NIGHT [ TALKSPORT] SAID: ” HE FEELS INTIMIDATED BY GROUPS OF WHAT HE THOUGHT WERE AFRICANS- NOW COMING TO HIS TOWN- THAT HE FEARED FOR HIS CHILDRENS FUTURES’- GUESS WHAT——-TEXTERS’ BRANDED THE GUY RACIST AND BNP- WHEN IT WAS CLEAR ALL HE WAS- WAS A CONCERNED FAMILY MAN—BUT IT SEEMS- IT’S OK FOR EVERY OTHER RACE TO DEMAND THEIR OWN NATIONS- BUT NOT ALLOWED FOR WHITE EUROPEANS-AMERICANS’-CANADIANS-AUSTRALIANS-NEW ZEALANDERS’-ETC-WHEN THEY SPEAK OUT IN THEIR OWN DEFENSE- THEY’RE BOMBARDED WITH CRIES OF FASCISTS’ RACIST KNUCKLE-DRAGGERS’ – WITH LESS THAN ONE BILLION WHITES OUT OF THE SIX BILLION FOLK ON EARTH- CAN WHITES’ NOW CLAIM TO BE OPPRESSED- BY THE MAJORITY?

NATURALLY THESE IMMIGRANTS WILL NEVER GROW OLD WILL THEY- AND THEN WHAT WHEN THEY DO–MORE AND MORE IMMIGRANTS?

FOOD SHORTAGES ON THE WAY- SO LETS BUILD ON OUR FARM LAND- THATS’ REAL VISION!!

OPTIMUM POPULATION TRUST COMPLETELY IGNORED- WHEN SAYING WE CAN’T SUPPORT MORE THAN 27 MILLION FROM OUR OWN RESOURCES!!!