Living Standards Improve at Slowest Rate in 50 Years as Immigration Soars
Households’ living standards are improving at the slowest rate in more than 50 years, as soaring immigration fuels population growth and the economy stalls. The Telegraph has more.
New figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that real GDP per head, which is often described as a measure of average living standards, is growing at the slowest rate in decades.
It has increased by only 0.3% a year on average so far in the 2020s. This is much lower than in any previous decade since at least the 1970s.
GDP per head has slowed as the population has grown faster than the economy. Net migration added 1.5m to the population across 2022 and 2023. The economy grew by 4.3% in 2022 as the U.K. bounced back from the pandemic but growth slowed to just 0.3% last year.
The economy has not kept pace as a result of a worklessness crisis and persistent problems with productivity. The number of people out of work from sickness has surged to a near-record high of 2.8 million, fuelling fears of a spiralling benefit bill.
The ONS said: “Long-term sickness, ageing of the resident population and net migration for reasons other than work each may have been factors that contributed to a higher population outside of the labour force.”
Worth reading in full.
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Over supply of cheap labour = reduction in labour productivity = downward wage pressure. (Basic economics)
Government spending is included in GDP, so all that money going on welfare to illegals, paying for hotels, and spent other immigrants increases GDP. This spending comes from money taken from producers in the economy.
This makes us all poorer.
GDP is meaningless. GDP per capita is the more informative measure. The so-called economic need for mass inward migration, is falsified in those ONS figures.
Car washing is a good example. Hand car washes run by immigrants have proliferated while automatic car washes have declined. So productivity of washing cars has reduced.
Hi JXB
Non economist here
“Over supply of cheap labour = reduction in labour productivity = downward wage pressure.”
I get the bits in bold, but why does the italicised bit have to be true?
Immigration Soars Living Standards Stall
The reasons given are incomplete.
yes, the economy has stalled and the population has soared. However there is another fundamental reason.
the productivity of the newcomers has been low and it has depressed productivity more widely. People have arrived with little or no English, little education relevant to this society and economy and with no money. Many have no experience or empathy with a liberal democracy where people (used to) respect each other snd the law and regulations we live by.
Many are actively antagonistic to our way of life.
Such people cannot be expected to produce as much as the rest of us. Their willingness to work for minimum wage has meant the public sector and private employers have avoided investing in more efficient ways, methods and systems.
Only the elites believe all this immigration is good for us. It has been good for them!!
It’s The Kalergi Plan…
Presumably if much of the nation’s wealth passes from the poor to the very rich, the GDP will appear unchanged even as poverty increases dramatically. Now what happened during COVID again?
Great quote from Brandon Smith, applicable to every nation of the West:
“The rest of the world is not our responsibility. We don’t owe the world anything, we don’t need to be involved in foreign wars, we are not beholden to foreign interests and we are not obligated to foreign peoples.”
Did somebody say ”immigration”? Matt Goodwin’s got a point. How can you be a sovereign nation if you can’t even control who comes in and out of your country? It’s especially shameful when you’re an island. It’s obviously not that they can’t it’s that they *won’t*. ”Britain might have voted for Brexit but don’t believe the hype —we are still not a sovereign, self-governing, independent nation. Why? Because we cannot control who comes in and out of the country. We cannot deport foreign national criminals. And, because of this, we cannot keep the British people and our children safe. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. A state that cannot control its borders is not a serious state and a nation that cannot keep its own people safe is not a serious nation. This is why I’ve gone against the grain by advocating that we leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), reform if not replace Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act (HRA), and pass new laws that put the interests and rights of the British people ahead of international conventions and courts. And so to underline this point and try and convince some of you of the… Read more »
Th easily manipulated half wits and climate change dreamers think it all the fault of the “boomers”. They simply don’t get it. —–We now have governments all over the western world importing millions of migrants to dilute national Identities, and phony climate policies specifically designed to lower living standards because the UN/WEF think our lifestyles are “unsustainable”—–This is all deliberate. It is not some anomaly or economic mishap. The whole idea of Agenda 2030 is that we all make do with LESS OF EVERYTHING. This makes a mockery of the claims by the current bunch of eco socialists that they want to create economic growth. They speak with forked tongue.