A curious thing is likely to happen next week: Donald Trump may well be handed positive headlines as a result of record-high immigration. Perhaps more curious still, a similar phenomenon in the UK is instead giving Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves a headache.
In both cases, the narrative is being shaped by how labour market statistics deal with the revelation that the population is larger than was previously realised. But this plays out in different ways on the two sides of the Atlantic.
Last quarter, Britain’s Office for National Statistics revised upward its estimates of net immigration during the two years ending in December 2023, calculating that around 300,000 more people than initially thought arrived and stayed in the UK, a 20 per cent bump. This increase, as well as some of the updated assumptions beneath the surface, fed into revised population projections published earlier this week.