Number of Britons leaving the UK significantly higher than previously thought
https://news.sky.com/story/politics-latest-starmer-asylum-mahmood-labour-budget-taxes-badenoch-farage-12593360?postid=10540569#liveblog-body
Posted by StGuthlac2025
Number of Britons leaving the UK significantly higher than previously thought
https://news.sky.com/story/politics-latest-starmer-asylum-mahmood-labour-budget-taxes-badenoch-farage-12593360?postid=10540569#liveblog-body
Posted by StGuthlac2025
36 Comments
My uncle was one of those who left the UK, he went to retire in Spain and cited his reason for leaving being that there was too many immigrants here
Great news for the government, that’ll bring net migration down (and mask the number of people we let in).
The real figure we need to understand is how many of those worked in the NHS. Both the Tories and Labour love to pretend that the NHS is the only gig in town, and so doctors, nurses, AHP etc can complain as much as they want, they don’t have a choice.
Only they do… and when it is a choice that has as big a barrier as moving country, it says that something is seriously wrong with the current state of play.
I feel like we really need to see a demographic breakdown here for these numbers to be useful? How many of these are low paid workers leaving to enjoy a higher standard of living? How many of these are the high value professionals we desperately need to enable and drive growth (doctors, scientists, finance experts, etc) who are leaving because the standard of living dropped? How many are ‘the rich’ taking their wealth away in order to avoid paying their share of tax?
On its own this isn’t really useful information. If we knew, for example, that the professional class is leaving due to living standards and the rich are not that might be a great justification for using wealth taxes on the rich to improve living standards, for example.
About half my friend group over the last 10 years have moved abroad. Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong.. they’re all doing far better now and it wont be long before I’m joining them I think.
I”ve seen a massive increase personally in a general sentimemt towards exiting the UK for a myriad of reasons.
I’ve spent my entire adult life going from one financial crash to another to a global pandemic to cost of living crisis, fucked wages and a fucked job market. I’m tired, fed up, the weather isn’t helping and I want out.
It’s because it’s a bit shit here . It’s cold . It rains all the time and it costs an arm and leg for a bloody pint anywhere that isn’t a small village pub at this point .
> The number of British nationals who left the UK in the year ending December 2024 was 257,000, compared with the previous estimate of just 77,000.
how on earth were they so far off.
British emigration is actually really high. Like as a proportion of the population it must be huge. Particularly people in their 20s-30s.
I would absolutely leave of my employer allowed complete remote work. If you’re a high earner, say 100k, I don’t think you’d feel like much of one if you’re in London. Nevermind people like me who aren’t close to that.
Are we really surprised? Cost of living has risen higher and higher while wages haven’t meaningfully increased in 20+ years. Meanwhile I left the UK as a fresh graduate already earning a salary that would have taken me 15 to 20 years to reach working in UK and that’s just talking about the financial benefits of moving.
I’m seriously considering a move to Ireland, especially if we get a Farage government.
This might be a little tin foil (or not) but my wife and I are in a same sex relationship and we plan on having a child next year or the year after. If Reform get into government we are concerned about the legitimacy of our marriage and our parental responsibility, so we’ve been looking at the possibility of moving to Canada or The Netherlands on work VISAs (we are a social worker and nurse) at least temporarily. We know that the far right is everywhere, but it feels like it’s going to get a bit scary here.
I know at least 4 doctors and 6 trans women who’ve left, ironically they all listed the NHS as a big part of it
I heard a lady on the radio talking about how the government were planning to give x amount of money to illegal immigrant to encourage them to leave. She said it was roughly the same amount as her gas bill which she obviously has to pay for herself.
Who wouldn’t want to move somewhere warmer when the winter months here are miserable, it’s too expensive to heat your house and the government seem bent on dishing out money to people who shouldn’t be entitled to it.
A state dedicated to propping up pensioners and telling the young to fuck off? Where politics is all about jumping from scapegoat to scapegoat, and where suggesting that a better life is possible is met with derision? We are one of the world’s largest economies yet struggle to provide the basics for everyone, rather instead sacrificing ourselves to prop up the old and the rich.
It used to be that the US, aus or Canada offered better pay, but the UK offered a better quality of life and more robust social contract. That’s no longer the case.
Thatchers “there is no such thing as a society” is finally coming to roost.
If it was not for my disabilities and reliance on the NHS I would have been gone long ago
Unsurprising given how much of a hell hole the place has become. Looking forward to moving away as soon as i’m able too tbh. Just feels like there’s no positive hope for the place in the coming years.
Yep. I left after realising that teaching in the UK was making me suicidal.
I love teaching, but kids and parents fighting me, low salary, 3 hours of unpaid work every single day and just the general miserableness of the country made me leave. Now, I’ve never been happier than I am right now.
Unless you have a boat load of money, everyone doing this will have a bad time. Other countries have their own problems and it’ll only be a matter of time where you feel like you’re stuck again.
If the US wake up and decide to let Western Europeans work there without a visa, it’s game over for the UK economy and the NHS
Everyone I know who has the means to leave (including myself) has left. Every Brit that was in my university class is in either the US, HK, or Singapore. I work in finance so it’s obviously biased but I did notice it myself, and my colleagues who work in the London office are now ironically majority from India or Nigeria.
I guess everyone just wants a better life at the end of the day. You couldn’t offer me double my salary to return to the UK though.
I’m planning on leaving due to UK pay being shit and European counterparts offering more, plus actually having working infrastructure.
We are one of those on the fence, albeit not going far (over to Ireland), but in terms of my friendship group, about a quarter of them have moved abroad now, working class lads but they’ve left and won’t be back.
I’ve been in the UK since 2014, my husband since 2010. We are actively making plans to leave. We have already sold some of our furniture in preparation
I know so many people leaving for the Middle East. High level engineers, project managers etc.
It doesn’t surprise me.
quite simply rent prices are too high compared to most people’s meagre take home salary, we aren’t forward thinking but in managed decline looking after old money
Purely out of curiosity, I’d really like to know the percentage of British born nationals vs those who have moved here, gained British Citizenship and are now moving somewhere else, or back to their previous country.
I bet none of those britons are working paycheck to paycheck.
Spoiler alert, there’s nowhere to run to working class. Everywhere is fucked for us.
Also, is no one disgusted by the pure greed and money-fetishism that is occurring here. People moving countries for no other reason than, “money”
That is such a perverted view of your place in society and the value structure you maintain.
“Oh ya, I’ll leave all my friends and family behind and go to a place where i don’t speak the native language, but I’ll have a bigger bank account that I can use to accumulate more shit to not be able to share with anyone meaningful. It’s gunna be awesome”
My mate at work was one of those. He was working as a skilled and experienced mechanic here for £35k and could not afford to get a house despite having a partner to help with income.
Now he is working in Dubai (not my sort of place personally but he loves it there) for a lot more money and he’s living it up in a huge luxury flat. For him it was common sense. Why live in a place that’s cold and depressing for most of the year, where you get paid poorly for a skilled and physical job, when everything is so expensive?
I left the UK in 2018, as I was 21 years old, already working and didn’t want the risk of a no-deal Brexit to stop me from being able to move abroad.
Personally, I found that the referendum caused a shift in tone in the types of conversations that suddenly formed public debate, both nationally and locally. All of a sudden, ‘foreigners’ were regarded with more suspicion and, at times, were subjected to blatant racism and xenophobia. The country’s ‘Little England’ mentality, which had, of course, always existed, was now given a platform in figures like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. The nation became totally divided and this was a palpable feeling in my small town near Manchester.
I don’t regret leaving in itself, but I regret being forced into this situation when I myself voted strongly against it. Like it or not, my future was and has been somewhat decided for me by a minority of the population (after all, few voted in the referendum, but that’s democracy) and I resent that. The UK has lost all sense of direction and identity in recent years, having been infected by far right populist rhetoric, and I have very little faith that anything will change in the short term.
This is the real problem facing the country to be honest, when buggers cry about “but the wealthy will just leave if we tax them!”
The country is literally falling apart due to the mega wealthy being ignored by taxes, and now we’re facing a brain drain, those that have the skills to emigrate, and can afford to do so, are doing so.
Not the billionaires and multi millionaires, they can sit on their renterisms and wealth extraction and live like kings.
But the most profitable and valuable to the country are leaving in droves, as the country no longer supports the ability for anyone but the mega rich to lead a good quality life.
Trouble is these probably aren’t the demographic we want leaving. Net figures only tell so much.
We need an attractive system for those we want (high earners, new businesses, shortage occupation, verified no criminal history).
At the moment government is putting these off with i.e. possible changes to IDR. But not yet reduced illegal asylum seekers etc.
The rise of populism and the clear evidence of misinformation leading the race with the risk of the continual rise of the ultra right based on misplaced xenophobic soundbites has me considering leaving my place of birth. A place I call home.
We’ve become so unwelcoming, so bigoted, so severely gullible to lies and soundbites, and so intent on causing ourselves as much harm as possible. We keep doing the same thing time and again (listening to the lies of the right and their racist supporters) and expecting different results.
I have little to no faith in the british people anymore, and it’s very saddening.
Half my friends have left the country now, All seem to have much higher quality of lives as a result. I’ll be joining them too in the next few years, uk just doesnt reward skilled middle earners like other countries do.
It seems the ONS are becoming someone that no one, including the government can trust. Constantly revising figures because they can’t get it right in the first place. They did exactly the same with the government finances, which is part of the reason the chancellor has been flipping back and forth about what’s coming in the budget.
Is there a breakdown of the demographics for this? Eg is this all retirees, or is it educated and motivated people moving their life and family away to seek better prospects.