Must be those migrants, right?<\/p>\n
Wrong. It\u2019s your Nan.<\/p>\n
Now, before anyone rushes off to write a strongly worded letter at me, I should probably clarify:<\/p>\n
Pensioners are doing exactly what they\u2019re supposed to be doing \u2013 retiring after a lifetime of working, raising families, paying taxes and contributing in ways you can\u2019t even put a number on. The problem is a structural one, and it\u2019s been decades in the making \u2013 all happening in plain sight while politicians have pointed their fingers at absolutely anything else but the real issue:<\/p>\n
Britain is getting old \u2013 fast. And we\u2019re nowhere close to being prepared for what that means.<\/p>\n
The ageing population problem<\/p>\n
As of now, there are approximately\u00a012.7 million people in the United Kingdom<\/a>\u00a0over the age of 65 \u2013 or just around 19% of the population \u2013 and that number is climbing. Analysts predict that by 2040, nearly\u00a0one in four people<\/a>\u00a0will be over 65, and likely retired, while the rest of the population will be working to keep the lights on.<\/p>\n What\u2019s happening at the same time is that birth rates have collapsed. Spectacularly. The UK\u2019s fertility rate is\u00a0around about 1.4 children per woman<\/a> \u2013 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:<\/p>\n A system that starts to buckle \u2013 far more people drawing from it, far fewer paying in.<\/p>\n Think of it like this \u2013 you\u2019re at the pub, and for every person buying a round of drinks, more people are expecting pints. Eventually the round-buyers either can\u2019t keep up, or they bugger off to another pub. That\u2019s the economy in miniature.<\/p>\n Fewer workers, more dependants<\/p>\n The dependency ratio<\/a> \u2013 the number of non-workers each worker has to support \u2013 was around 5:1 in the 50s. Today, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Now, if social media is to be believed (which it shouldn\u2019t for the most part), the obvious fix is to halt migration \u2013 and in some deep, dark, dingy corners, to institute \u201cremigration\u201d \u2013 or in other words to start deporting anyone who wasn\u2019t born here, and in some cases, even those who were born here but aren\u2019t \u201cethnically\u201d British1<\/a>.<\/p>\n And this is where the whole conversation becomes not just dishonest, but completely arse-backwards, because the issue we have is that migrants aren\u2019t the ones making this situation worse, they\u2019re one of the very few things stopping it from collapsing entirely.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a bit of maths that politicians (and right-wing commentators) tend to avoid when it comes to this subject.<\/p>\n The economics of migration<\/p>\n A child born in the United Kingdom will cost the state around about \u00a3200k before they are able to meaningfully contribute to taxes. This is made up of healthcare, schooling, child benefits, loans \u2013 all of it.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s not a drain, that\u2019s the bargain of the century! They\u2019ve been raised abroad, educated and someone else\u2019s 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\u2019t fill ourselves.<\/p>\n And this is the point where I have to pause and say: I hate writing about this.<\/p>\n I loathe the way that terms like \u201cnet contributor\u201d has been weaponised by so many voices on the right. It smacks far too closely to me of that old fascist language of \u201cuseless eaters.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u00a314 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.<\/p>\n A delivery driver, a cleaner, a retail worker \u2013 all of them aren\u2019t filling the Exchequer\u2019s coffers, but they are literally the people that make the economy function. A city doesn\u2019t run without people mopping floors, driving buses and doing all those day-to-day things that keep the cogs of society rolling over.<\/p>\n The myth of net contribution<\/p>\n This grim obsession with \u201cnet contribution\u201d and \u201cdrains on the public purse\u201d treats these people as liabilities, when in reality, they\u2019re the foundation of our daily life.<\/p>\n The real fiscal drain isn\u2019t a young Romanian who arrives and works here for twenty years, or a Bangladeshi care worker coming to look after your grandad \u2013 it\u2019s 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\u2019t expensive because they\u2019re generous \u2013 which they most certainly are not in this country \u2013 but because there are simply more people drawing on them for longer.<\/p>\n Social care is another cost that\u2019s spiralling for the same reason \u2013 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\u00a0\u00a3140bn a year<\/a>, and that\u2019s before winter fuel payments, bus passes and the rest.<\/p>\n None of this is immoral \u2013 people getting older isn\u2019t a failing. But pretending migrants are the cause is deadly, unhelpful and unwelcome distraction from the conversations we should be having instead.<\/p>\n The real causes of low productivity<\/p>\n 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\u2019t), but because they\u2019re actually investing in infrastructure, education and technology.<\/p>\n We just\u2026 haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n Instead of building high-speed rail (a near impossibility in this country<\/a>), digital networks2<\/a>\u00a0and 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\u00a0planning system that blocks\u00a0<\/a>meaningful development, an\u00a0underfunded health service<\/a>\u00a0meaning people stay sicker for longer and an education sector that has been\u00a0completely hollowed<\/a>\u00a0out by years and years of austerity.<\/p>\n When a Filipino nurse arrives on a ward, she doesn\u2019t make the British nurses less productive \u2013 she makes the entire system more sustainable. When a Bulgarian construction worker builds the houses we need, he\u2019s not stealing a job, he\u2019s actually hands-on addressing the shortage that we\u2019ve faced since the 1980s3<\/a>.<\/p>\n None of this is \u201cdisplacement\u201d \u2013 it\u2019s supplementation.<\/p>\n This dynamic plays itself out across social care, housing and the NHS. We already have\u00a01.6m people working in care<\/a>, and need\u00a0hundreds of thousands more just to meet the demand<\/a>\u00a0we 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\u2019t been built since the 1980s. The NHS is straining itself into near collapse not because too many migrants use it, but because it\u2019s been systematically underfunded and is kept afloat by migrant staff, especially in nursing and medical cohorts.<\/p>\n Hard choices for an ageing society<\/p>\n So, if migrants aren\u2019t the problem \u2013 what are our options?<\/p>\n Well, without migration, we can jack up taxes dramatically, cut services brutally or hope4<\/a>\u00a0that someone in Westminster can actually come up with an industrial strategy or productivity miracle. And it\u2019s properly a rock-and-hard-place situation we find ourselves in.<\/p>\n Higher taxes mean telling the public to hand over eye-watering sums that they\u2019re not prepared to pay, and the political will for increasing taxation on ultra-high earners is completely absent.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0wealthiest\u00a0fittest.<\/p>\n 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\u2019re unattractive for winning over votes.<\/p>\n Losing the global race for talent<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Even Japan, notoriously closed to immigration is opening up its doors because it knows that without urgent intervention, they\u2019re in a helluva lot of trouble. We, on the other hand, built a \u201chostile environment\u201d that tells people they\u2019re not welcome, and then sheepishly wonder why in the world we can\u2019t fill roles in hospitals, labs or classrooms.<\/p>\n This issue is unfortunately not abstract, nor is it the problem of future generations. If you\u2019re young, you will be part of a shrinking workforce supporting more pensioners than ever before. If you\u2019re older, your retirement depends on there being enough younger workers to keep the machine ticking over.<\/p>\n The maths is unforgiving and unyielding.<\/p>\n We either increase our working-age population \u2013 or we accept falling living standards. There is no third way out of this.<\/p>\n We return now to where we started.<\/p>\n Politicians knew \u2013 and looked away<\/p>\n The economy is weak, productivity is stagnant and our services are buckling. Politicians are offering us easy answers \u2013 blame a migrant. But that answer is a lie. We have a challenge when it comes to demographics. Your nan isn\u2019t the villain here \u2013 nor are migrants. The villains are the politicians who have known, full well, for decades, that the United Kingdom is ageing, who\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n And no, migrants won\u2019t solve the issue completely, but, without migration, we are sunk. And until we stop treating migrants as drains, as \u201cnon-contributors\u201d, as problems to be managed instead of people whose labour and effort holds the country together, we won\u2019t have the honest debate about what we need to do to to actually fix the problem.<\/p>\n The demographic time bomb is ticking \u2013 blaming migrants for the sound doesn\u2019t defuse it, it just makes sure it goes off while we\u2019re all looking the other way.<\/p>\n This article is republished with kind permission of The Bear. Read the original on his Substack here<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"Mother](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/mother-and-baby.jpg\")
Image by Helena Lopes<\/a> (CC0)<\/p>\n![\"Young](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/care-home-elderly-man.jpg\")
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