Despite virtually every politician in Britain telling voters they want fewer arrivals, competing economic pressures have pushed ministers to use their absolute control of immigration rules to quietly liberalize.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe increase in net migration from 2019 to 2023 resulted mostly from non-EU citizens coming on work and study visas,\u201d said Ben Brindle, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory.<\/p>\n
\u201cUniversities started to recruit students overseas more actively as their financial situation deteriorated, while social care providers turned to migrant care workers to fill vacancies as poor pay and working conditions in the sector, caused by limited government funding, made it increasingly difficult to retain workers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, bold promises during the EU referendum that the U.K.\u2019s beloved National Health Service could be resuscitated with money redirected from Brussels have also failed to deliver. OECD figures collated by the Health Foundation think tank show the U.K. still spent at least a quarter less on its health services in 2022 than France, the Netherlands and Germany.<\/p>\n
Stephen Rocks, an economist at the Health Foundation, told POLITICO: \u201cThe U.K.\u2019s economy is already smaller and will grow more slowly because of Brexit. Weak economic growth has been at the heart of our struggle to fund health care and other public services adequately for more than a decade.\u201d Max Warner, a health economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, added that \u201cNHS performance against many measures is substantially worse than in 2016-17.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beyond peak Brexit<\/p>\n
It all adds up. Guy Verhofstadt, the outspoken ex-prime minister of Belgium who represented the European Parliament in talks between London and Brussels, thinks \u201cPeak Brexit\u201d has already been reached.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite virtually every politician in Britain telling voters they want fewer arrivals, competing economic pressures have pushed ministers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":162044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[3971,11663,186,6850,1789,5109,802,748,1193,10684,26259,6852,44345,473,60193,28284,51827,2000,5110,299,5187,1699,21604,1214,36,1824,4884,68206,3941,40,807,1198,27602,2441,2132,8419,6657,704,619,9891,2443,5112,1199,2143,6861,68207,60071,3053,1201,6862,68208,16,20589,15,49,1220],"class_list":{"0":"post-162043","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-agriculture","9":"tag-agriculture-and-food","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-beef","12":"tag-belgium","13":"tag-boris-johnson","14":"tag-brexit","15":"tag-britain","16":"tag-british-politics","17":"tag-chemicals","18":"tag-cptpp","19":"tag-customs-union","20":"tag-daniel-hannan","21":"tag-defense","22":"tag-dominic-cummings","23":"tag-elections-in-europe","24":"tag-erasmus","25":"tag-eu","26":"tag-eu-referendum","27":"tag-europe","28":"tag-european","29":"tag-european-union","30":"tag-euroskeptics","31":"tag-exports","32":"tag-france","33":"tag-germany","34":"tag-great-britain","35":"tag-guy-verhofstadt","36":"tag-health-care","37":"tag-immigration","38":"tag-keir-starmer","39":"tag-kemi-badenoch","40":"tag-margaret-thatcher","41":"tag-markets","42":"tag-mexico","43":"tag-michael-gove","44":"tag-migration","45":"tag-new-zealand","46":"tag-rachel-reeves","47":"tag-referendum","48":"tag-regulation","49":"tag-rishi-sunak","50":"tag-services","51":"tag-singapore","52":"tag-single-market","53":"tag-solomon-islands","54":"tag-steve-baker","55":"tag-the-netherlands","56":"tag-trade","57":"tag-trade-agreements","58":"tag-u-k-election-2024","59":"tag-uk","60":"tag-uk-us-trade-talks","61":"tag-united-kingdom","62":"tag-united-states","63":"tag-ursula-von-der-leyen"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}