By 2039, the Office for National Statistics expects the UK population to be 74.3 million, an increase that is accounted for, in almost exactly equal parts, by immigration and natural growth (more births than deaths). Its estimates of net migration are 256,000 next year, 232,000 the year after, dropping below 200,000 in the 2020s. Given that net migration was over 300,000 last year, and the average over the past decade has been 250,000, the real story here is that the ONS expects migration to decrease. At a guess that’ll be because, by 2020, word will have got out to the world that our public services have been asset-stripped and we’re all slogging through a low-wage, high-rent economy in a state of neo-Georgian servitude.

The ONS has said two things, in other words: first, that migration is expected to go down; second, that population trends half-spring from the invigorating human propensity to cling to life, and create life, wherever it can. And these messages have been ignored or turned on their heads to become, this TINY island is being SWAMPED by foreigners.

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Upon this false premise is built an entire cathedral of nonsense. Nowhere, not even in the debate about renewable energy, is misinformation distributed so liberally and shamelessly by reputable people, MPs and commentators, who don’t even have the excuse of illiteracy.

There is no shortage of space on this island. It may be tiny, especially when you place it atop Sweden, and it may seem improbable, trying to visually conceive its geographical limits, that 74 million people could squash themselves on to it. But there’s really no need for that bogus exercise, when perfectly good data exists on how much of the UK is urbanised – 10.6% of England, 1.9% of Scotland, 3.6% of Northern Ireland and 4.1% of Wales. When you add in parks, gardens and other open spaces within the built environment, the proportion of “developed” England drops to 2.3%. There may be too many of us for the things we can be bothered to build – houses, schools, hospitals – but there are not too many of us for the space that we have, nor will there be in 2025.

This isn’t an argument for unbridled development, and nor does it intend to minimise how much overcrowding there is, when we all try to live in the same bit of that 2.3%. People cannot simply be sent to build shacks in Wales, when they overspill from Bristol. Most of the natural world needs to be left unmolested if we’re to have any quality of life.

Nevertheless, the potential here is vast – were productive industry nurtured, developed but underpopulated areas would have jobs for people to move for. Were development undertaken systematically and with a social purpose, rather than up-against-a-wall and on the cheap, population growth could be welcomed rather than dreaded.

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Which brings us to housing. We have a housing crisis on one hand, and high immigration on the other, and those two facts are always left hanging since the causal link between them is apparently so obvious. The fact is, they are not related: house building is slack, but the supply of rooms per person has never been higher; what has really changed is who owns what and who can afford to rent it from them. Plainly, if there were visionary local councils throwing up plentiful, mixed-tenure developments, that would alter the picture somewhat, but what we’re really looking at is a rentier power dynamic. Capital holds all the cards in housing, and is concentrated in very few hands. A world without migration wouldn’t alter that.

Low wages, likewise, are laid at the feet of recent arrivals. The fault line here is between those who argue that, while immigrants may slightly bring down wages sectorially, their boost to GDP makes up for it, and those who counter that it doesn’t feel that way to the people working in the affected sectors. This is an infuriating diversion: the people to blame for low wages are the people who pay low wages. The sectors crammed with workers not earning a living wage (this, according to the Living Wage Foundation at the weekend, amounts to 6 million people) have spent decades whittling down pay. Migrant labour is merely one tool in their kit. The key victory has been the propaganda push that has reclassified low-paid work as “low-skilled” to justify harvesting most of its output as profit.

Immigrants have been successfully, egregiously framed as a threat. All sources of immigration have become one. The debate refuses to distinguish between a student and an engineer and a cockle picker and a refugee. Never mind that our universities are a major export, and without foreign students our balance of payments would be stuffed; never mind that sharing expertise across borders is what allows creativity and innovation to flourish; never mind that the exploitation of workers is a case for employers to answer, and it is not for the exploited to apologise for being too plentiful; never mind that we are signatories of the refugee convention and were, in living memory, proud of that fact. The result is that we will now stand by and watch people freeze and, in some cases, literally rot in makeshift European camps, because they’re probably “economic” migrants, and even though we know they’re not, we can’t have them because they take up space and we’re too tiny.

The deliberate lack of sophistication has led, inexorably, to a lack of humanity, sitting on the terrain like a toxic fog, choking any pride we could reasonably take in our national character. Those purporting to protect Britain from the outside threat of the stranger are actually destroying its values from within.