Covid-19 led to an exodus that Brexit will make harder to reverse. But a slide into insularity isn’t inevitable
When my family immigrated to London from the US in the early 1970s, we were going against the tide: inner London’s population shrank by a fifth that decade. But since then, we’ve become accustomed to an ever-growing population, particularly in London and the south-east of England, driven both by inflows of people from abroad and rising life expectancy. Over the past 20 years, the UK’s annual population growth has averaged about 400,000. And despite an ageing population, that has propelled growth in the labour force and the economy as a whole: in the same period, the UK created nearly 6m additional jobs.
That changed in 2020. With Covid-19 pushing the number of deaths to the highest in a century, and birthrates falling, it seems likely that more people died than were born for the first time since 1976. Alongside that, however, was a dramatic exodus of foreign-born residents from the UK. The latest Office for National Statistics figures suggest that a million people have left the country (at the end of 2020 Britain had almost a million fewer non-UK-born residents than a year earlier). This would represent by far the largest annual fall in the resident population since the second world war, with London especially hard hit.
