So, I have a bit of bad news for a few people.
The economy is struggling (we all know this), and it feels like we’re not doing particularly well in our country these days. And we aren’t. Productivity has been low to the point of being stagnant, and it has been for years.
Must be those migrants, right?
Wrong. It’s your Nan.
Now, before anyone rushes off to write a strongly worded letter at me, I should probably clarify:
Pensioners are doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing – retiring after a lifetime of working, raising families, paying taxes and contributing in ways you can’t even put a number on. The problem is a structural one, and it’s been decades in the making – all happening in plain sight while politicians have pointed their fingers at absolutely anything else but the real issue:
Britain is getting old – fast. And we’re nowhere close to being prepared for what that means.
The ageing population problem
As of now, there are approximately 12.7 million people in the United Kingdom over the age of 65 – or just around 19% of the population – and that number is climbing. Analysts predict that by 2040, nearly one in four people will be over 65, and likely retired, while the rest of the population will be working to keep the lights on.
What’s happening at the same time is that birth rates have collapsed. Spectacularly. The UK’s fertility rate is around about 1.4 children per woman – well below the 2.1 needed just to maintain a stable population. When you put these two statistics together, and it leads to one thing:
Image by Helena Lopes (CC0)
A system that starts to buckle – far more people drawing from it, far fewer paying in.
Think of it like this – you’re at the pub, and for every person buying a round of drinks, more people are expecting pints. Eventually the round-buyers either can’t keep up, or they bugger off to another pub. That’s the economy in miniature.
Fewer workers, more dependants
The dependency ratio – the number of non-workers each worker has to support – was around 5:1 in the 50s. Today, it’s about 3:1, and by 2050, it will be two workers supporting one pensioner, plus children, plus the NHS, plus subsidised meals for MPs, plus everything else that holds the country together to a large extent.
Now, if social media is to be believed (which it shouldn’t for the most part), the obvious fix is to halt migration – and in some deep, dark, dingy corners, to institute “remigration” – or in other words to start deporting anyone who wasn’t born here, and in some cases, even those who were born here but aren’t “ethnically” British1.
And this is where the whole conversation becomes not just dishonest, but completely arse-backwards, because the issue we have is that migrants aren’t the ones making this situation worse, they’re one of the very few things stopping it from collapsing entirely.
There’s a bit of maths that politicians (and right-wing commentators) tend to avoid when it comes to this subject.
The economics of migration
A child born in the United Kingdom will cost the state around about £200k before they are able to meaningfully contribute to taxes. This is made up of healthcare, schooling, child benefits, loans – all of it.
A migrant arriving at the age of 20, on the other hand, skips that bill entirely. They come into the country, already trained, already working-age and immediately plug-in-able to the tax system. That’s not a drain, that’s the bargain of the century! They’ve been raised abroad, educated and someone else’s expense, and when they get here, for the first five years at least, have no recourse to public funds, start paying taxes, buying things, and filling jobs that we can’t fill ourselves.
And this is the point where I have to pause and say: I hate writing about this.
I loathe the way that terms like “net contributor” has been weaponised by so many voices on the right. It smacks far too closely to me of that old fascist language of “useless eaters.”
It reduces human life to a crude calculation of taxes in versus services out, completely ignoring everything else a person brings into the equation. Someone stacking shelves at the local Tesco earning £14 an hour may not, in fact, be a net contributor to the economy in terms of tax intake, but without them, the massive corporation that hires them for a pittance is going to struggle to keep day to day operations going.
A delivery driver, a cleaner, a retail worker – all of them aren’t filling the Exchequer’s coffers, but they are literally the people that make the economy function. A city doesn’t run without people mopping floors, driving buses and doing all those day-to-day things that keep the cogs of society rolling over.
The myth of net contribution
This grim obsession with “net contribution” and “drains on the public purse” treats these people as liabilities, when in reality, they’re the foundation of our daily life.
The real fiscal drain isn’t a young Romanian who arrives and works here for twenty years, or a Bangladeshi care worker coming to look after your grandad – it’s the unavoidable and entirely justified cost of an ageing society. Healthcare costs rise with age, they do so sharply. The average person over 85 years old costs the NHS ten times more than someone in their twenties or thirties. Pensions aren’t expensive because they’re generous – which they most certainly are not in this country – but because there are simply more people drawing on them for longer.
Social care is another cost that’s spiralling for the same reason – more people need more hours of care, and there are fewer family members available to provide it. The state pension cost alone is now just about £140bn a year, and that’s before winter fuel payments, bus passes and the rest.
None of this is immoral – people getting older isn’t a failing. But pretending migrants are the cause is deadly, unhelpful and unwelcome distraction from the conversations we should be having instead.
The real causes of low productivity
Meanwhile, our productivity issue we have in this country has nothing to do with immigration. The UK has spent the last decade stuck in neutral while countries like Germany and Denmark are still pulling ahead. Not because they have fewer migrants (they don’t), but because they’re actually investing in infrastructure, education and technology.
We just… haven’t.
Instead of building high-speed rail (a near impossibility in this country), digital networks2 and industrial capacity, we have had non-stop rows about Polish plumbers. The things that are actually killing productivity in this country are gridlocked roads, a planning system that blocks meaningful development, an underfunded health service meaning people stay sicker for longer and an education sector that has been completely hollowed out by years and years of austerity.
When a Filipino nurse arrives on a ward, she doesn’t make the British nurses less productive – she makes the entire system more sustainable. When a Bulgarian construction worker builds the houses we need, he’s not stealing a job, he’s actually hands-on addressing the shortage that we’ve faced since the 1980s3.
None of this is “displacement” – it’s supplementation.
This dynamic plays itself out across social care, housing and the NHS. We already have 1.6m people working in care, and need hundreds of thousands more just to meet the demand we have at the moment. There is no way birth rates would cover this. Housing shortages predate recent migration by decades, with the actual issue being that enough homes haven’t been built since the 1980s. The NHS is straining itself into near collapse not because too many migrants use it, but because it’s been systematically underfunded and is kept afloat by migrant staff, especially in nursing and medical cohorts.
Hard choices for an ageing society
So, if migrants aren’t the problem – what are our options?
Well, without migration, we can jack up taxes dramatically, cut services brutally or hope4 that someone in Westminster can actually come up with an industrial strategy or productivity miracle. And it’s properly a rock-and-hard-place situation we find ourselves in.
Higher taxes mean telling the public to hand over eye-watering sums that they’re not prepared to pay, and the political will for increasing taxation on ultra-high earners is completely absent.
Service cuts mean telling pensioners that on top of already having to wait far too long for interventions, there will be even less resource available and it becomes survival of the wealthiest fittest.
And those productivity miracles or industrial strategies? They require vast amounts for investment in infrastructure and technology and tend to need a timeline that runs for longer than a parliamentary term, meaning that they’re unattractive for winning over votes.
Losing the global race for talent
While we tie ourselves into knots quarrelling amongst ourselves about the issue of migration, other countries are racing ahead in the global competition for skilled workers. Canada is scooping up many of them, as is Australia.
Even Japan, notoriously closed to immigration is opening up its doors because it knows that without urgent intervention, they’re in a helluva lot of trouble. We, on the other hand, built a “hostile environment” that tells people they’re not welcome, and then sheepishly wonder why in the world we can’t fill roles in hospitals, labs or classrooms.
This issue is unfortunately not abstract, nor is it the problem of future generations. If you’re young, you will be part of a shrinking workforce supporting more pensioners than ever before. If you’re older, your retirement depends on there being enough younger workers to keep the machine ticking over.
The maths is unforgiving and unyielding.
We either increase our working-age population – or we accept falling living standards. There is no third way out of this.
We return now to where we started.
Politicians knew – and looked away
The economy is weak, productivity is stagnant and our services are buckling. Politicians are offering us easy answers – blame a migrant. But that answer is a lie. We have a challenge when it comes to demographics. Your nan isn’t the villain here – nor are migrants. The villains are the politicians who have known, full well, for decades, that the United Kingdom is ageing, who’ve failed to invest in productivity, housing, care and health, and who now desperately rely on migrants to scapegoat lest their own negligence comes to light.
And no, migrants won’t solve the issue completely, but, without migration, we are sunk. And until we stop treating migrants as drains, as “non-contributors”, as problems to be managed instead of people whose labour and effort holds the country together, we won’t have the honest debate about what we need to do to to actually fix the problem.
The demographic time bomb is ticking – blaming migrants for the sound doesn’t defuse it, it just makes sure it goes off while we’re all looking the other way.
This article is republished with kind permission of The Bear. Read the original on his Substack here.
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