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Non-EU net migration has fallen sharply too.
It proves what was always obvious to anyone who looked at it, that high net immigration was temporary, especially the peak post covid and the special scheme for Ukrainians.
And note also that the UK and EU share high-quality education systems, Western Judeo-Christian culture and Western-aligned geopolitics.
Recent waves of immigration from countries in the Middle East and North Africa are importing wholly different culture, geopolitics, and crucially, we are importing from countries with measurably lower standard of literacy and numeracy.
These are objective facts, and they are not criticisms or judgements on the character of those who are migrating.
I would make exactly the same choices as our Pakistani, Somali and Eritrean friends, if I were in their position.
When the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottomans, many Greek scholars fled to Italy bringing:
• Greek manuscripts
• Knowledge of ancient philosophy
• Classical Greek language expertise
This boosted the revival of classical learning.
The Renaissance had far more to do with the Catholic Church than it had with Islam, and I’m curious to know who it was that told you otherwise?
Track down a copy of Bettany Hughes’ “When The Moors Ruled In Europe”. I think it is on Youtube. It is long but exceptionally clearly presented.
Put simply, were it not for the Reconquista, what we understand as the renaissance would be very clearly perceived as Islamic in origin.
And maybe don’t trust ChatGPT to do anything but regurgitate the prevailing interpretation of history, which was, in fact, reshaped radically by Catholic propaganda.
The Renaissance is defined as follows:
> The Renaissance was a European cultural movement from the 14th to 17th centuries, marking a "rebirth" of classical Greek and Roman learning after the Middle Ages. It was a period of significant innovation in art, literature, science, and philosophy, with key developments like humanism. Notable figures include Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and the movement began in Italy before spreading across Europe.
Islam did not even exist in the time of the Classical Greek and Roman periods.
Neither Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael ever met Muslims directly, travelled to the Islamic world, or interacted with Islamic institutions.
I honestly think that if politicians had blocked this (reform style) in 2000, the resulting economic slowdown and increasing cost for labor intensive products would've seen them voted out in short order.
I do agree that negative consequences of the approach were played down/underestimated/neglected, but painting it as pure uncaring negative is just disingenuous.
Just look at how Brexit alone affected lorry driver wages; if you cut immigration 25 years ago, you'd have seen the same effect across multiple sectors magnifying each other (because labor supply is simply insufficient), and there is a lot of people that would have suffered from higher costs in all those sectors without getting any compensation.
As a "sanity check" for this: If the UK economy did not "need" immigrant labor, you would expect significant unemployment and very high difficulty in finding unskilled labor jobs. Neither is the case.