From Bloomberg via Canada's Financial Post, January 4:
The number of people who die in Britain this year is set to exceed those born in the country, the Resolution Foundation said, in what the think tank described as a permanent shift that will increase the UK’s dependency on migration.
The number of people who die in Britain this year is set to exceed those born in the country, the Resolution Foundation said, in what the think tank described as a permanent shift that will increase the UK’s dependency on migration.
Britain will see a shortfall in births in 2026, Resolution Foundation projected as part of its annual economic outlook released on Monday. That gap will increase “by an ever-widening margin, forever closing a chapter in the demographics” of Britain that stretches back to at least the start of the 20th century, the research institution said.
While the number of deaths in the UK exceeded births in 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and again in 2023, the native population grew slightly in each of the past two years, Resolution Foundation estimated. From 2026 onwards, any population growth “is set to come from international net migration,” the think tank said.
The report shows the stakes of the debate gripping Britain as Prime Minister Keir Starmer seeks to reverse the rise of Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK in opinion polls. Starmer and his home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, have pledged to bring down migration from record highs, at the risk of the Labour Party’s broader commitment to end an extended period of economic stagnation.
Opposition to immigration — a key driver of Britain’s vote a decade ago to leave the European Union — has risen further in the wake of a surge in both legal immigration and arrivals of asylum-seekers from across the English Channel. Net migration reached a peak of almost one million a year after the then-Conservative government loosened visa rules to offset the shortfall of European workers and accommodate Ukrainians and Hong Kongers fleeing strife at home.
The UK’s projected shortfall in births mirrors trends elsewhere in Europe and across the developed world, fueling support for policies to encourage women to have more children. The projected population accounts for everyone already in the UK, including families of foreign descent as well as those who have been in the country for generations.
“This may shift the conversation on migration away from arguments over whether the country is already ‘full’ and onto whether we want to address population decline,” said Greg Thwaites, research director for the Resolution Foundation. Thwaites acknowledged the subject was “likely to remain politically charged.”....
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Oh well, as they say in Old Blighty, "Allahu Akbar!"
And from the Telegraph, November 27, 2025:
As a grizzled travel writer, I’ve picked up a few tips over the years. And one of them is this: if you want to understand a country quickly, take an urban food tour. You get to sample delicious scran, you learn how locals eat, drink and socialise and – crucially – as the chat flows, you hear the sort of throwaway facts that make you sit back in surprise.
So it was last night, for me, in Phnom Penh, the increasingly seductive, hedonistic capital of Cambodia. I was eating buffalo beef jerky with a spry fifty-something guy called Vannak, right outside the monastery where the young Pol Pot, the future communist tyrant then known as Saloth Sar, was a trainee monk.
Naturally the conversation strayed to the appalling Khmer Rouge era. Vannak explained how he was nine years old on that burning hot April day in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and drove everyone out, including his own family of bourgeois business folk.
Then he offered up his startling fact: today, Phnom Penh once again has a population of about 2m, as it did in 1974 before the Khmer Rouge. However, 80 per cent of these people are “newcomers”, with no ancestral, cultural or generational link to the old Phnom Penh. The original population that was kicked out in 1975 has never truly returned.
Setting down my beer, I started taking notes, hoping to find a way to illustrate this astounding change. I wrote the lines “imagine if this happened to London, if most of the population was replaced in two generations, how incredible it might…”
And then I stopped. Because I realised that actually has happened to London. In 1975 the white British population of London was about 85 per cent. Today, fifty years later, it is just 37 per cent, and falling.
Now, of course what has happened to Londoners is utterly different from the Cambodian experience. Voluntarily moving from Bow to Braintree is, to put it mildly, not the same as being marched out of your home at gunpoint. Any moral comparison would be grotesque. But in strictly numerical terms the transformation with war-torn Phnom Penh is, like it or not, analogous. Put it differently: what’s happened to London is almost unprecedented in peacetime.
A glance at history shows this. If you seek out examples of dramatic ethnic change comparable with London 1975-2025, you get these: Constantinople from 1453-1500, when Ottoman conquest reduced the Greek population from 90 per cent to 30 per cent. Alternatively there is medieval Toledo, Spain, when the Reconquista reduced the majority Muslim population to a much smaller minority in the years 1085-1150.
Another example is Thessaloniki between 1870-1928, when convulsions of empire followed by the First World War, married with forced ethnic expulsions, saw the Turks replaced by Greeks. A fourth contender might be one of the Polish cities purged of its ethnic German population in the smoking ruins of Europe, 1945-1950. Somewhere like Wroclaw.
Indeed, finding peacetime equivalents for the disappearance of the Cockneys is seriously difficult. You might argue for New York City in the late 19th century. Buenos Aires is also a possibility, from 1870 to 1914....
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