Rees-Mogg deliberately misses the point on migration

With apparently none of the 121 actual Conservative MPs available, Jacob-Rees Mogg – GB News host, soon-to-be reality TV star and humiliatingly ejected former member for North East Somerset – was the Tory representative on last night’s Question Time.

And what a reminder of the loss his removal from Parliament is! With the panellists asked by an audience member whether the UK had been running an open borders experiment, on a day net migration was shown to be 906,000 in the year up to June 2023, the former business secretary, er, massaged the figures somewhat.

Asked by Fiona Bruce why the figures for net migration were lower pre-Brexit than post-Brexit, Rees-Mogg said: “Well, hold on, they were completely wrong pre-Brexit… the figures, let me just explain, the pre-Brexit figures, it was thought that about two million people would register as a right to stay here post-Brexit. The figure was over five million when it was finally created.

“So for years the ONS [Office for National Statistics] were giving us wrong figures on the people coming from the European Union. But yes, I do dispute that they were lower beforehand because they were simply wrong. There were an extra three million-plus people who had come in who no-one was recording.”

Rees-Mogg is (deliberately) missing the point, as well as being badly wrong about his figures. The ONS believed there were likely to be 3.7 million EU nationals who would want to remain post-Brexit, then found there were actually 5.7 million. So an extra 2m rather than 3m – but the crucial point is that many of these were people who had been settled in the UK for years and years – in some cases, even pre-dating Britain’s membership of the EEC, now the EU.

The actual truth, of course, is that, pre-Brexit, net migration was around 330,000. Once post-Brexit rules came into force at the end of 2020, immigration from the EU began to fall, but non-EU immigration went up rapidly. In the year to June 2015, it was 163,000, but four years later it was up to 224,000. In the year to June 2024, it reached the remarkable figure of 845,000.

Facts and figures were never Rees-Mogg’s strong point. Perhaps it’s for the best that, according to the trailer, his new Discovery+ show focuses on more weighty matters of state such as who irons his boxer shorts!