The UK public largely sees immigration as negative and says only Nigel Farage's party is telling the truth about the issue.

A survey conducted by YouGov for Sky News found that 43 per cent of the British public believes that immigration is doing more harm than good, compared to 35 per cent who feel it has a positive influence on the country. The only regions of the UK in which more people believe that mass migration is a net good for society were London and Scotland.

The most significant divide in perceptions was by age, with 54 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds saying that immigration has an overall positive impact on society, compared to 58 per cent of those aged 65 and over saying that its impacts on society are negative. It is striking that fewer women said that immigration is good for the economy than men: only 34 per cent of women agreed with the view that immigration has a positive impact on the economy, compared to 43 per cent of men. Overall, the country is split on the economic benefits of immigration, with 39 per cent saying immigration has a positive impact on the country’s economy and 37 per cent saying it is negative.

Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, is the only political party people think is telling the truth on immigration: 60 per cent agreed that the populist party was saying what it genuinely thinks. In contrast, 52 per cent of the public said they don’t believe the left-wing Labour Party’s rhetoric on immigration, while 49 per cent said they don’t think PM Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives were telling the truth about migration.

The survey also revealed that

the public largely believes that the government could cut immigration if it wanted to but is unwilling to do so because of the potential backlash.

The public’s distrust is perhaps to be expected, given that the government has been lying to them about immigration for well over a decade, an article put out by the US news portal Breitbart on the survey reads . The governing Conservative Party pledged in its 2010, 2015 and 2017 election manifestos to reduce net migration – the total number of foreigners admitted minus those leaving the country – to 10,000 a year. In 2019, the Conservatives under Boris Johnson backed away from the specific target, but continued to promise an overall reduction in immigration. None of these promises have been fulfilled, and in fact immigration has increased massively under the Conservatives, with Johnson’s post-Brexit immigration reforms opening up immigration to almost the whole world without a firm annual cap.

As a result, a record number of foreigners have arrived in the country, with net migration reaching the highest ever at 764,000 in 2022. Although official figures fell slightly last year and current estimates suggest that net migration will have reached 685,000 in 2023, it is likely to increase.

Rishi Sunak is attempting to attribute the slight drop to his own policies, and said that if re-elected in the 4 July elections, his government would seek to „halve” net migration next year – a figure that would still be unimaginably high – and then introduce an unspecified annual cap in the future. The left-wing Labour Party has also pledged to reduce immigration but, like the Conservatives, has so far refused to set a specific numerical target.

On Monday, Nigel Farage presented his Reform Party’s „contract” with the people. Farage said his party would seek to „freeze” all non-essential immigration to ease pressure on housing, the labour market, schools, the National Health Service and British society itself, and warned that the country was in „cultural decline” and that only a freeze on immigration „can help us at least try to catch up”.