Low birth rates among indigenous Brits and mass migration are driving the trend, an analysis shows
White Britons will become a minority in their own country in less than four decades, a recent study has suggested.
The UK has seen a massive influx of legal and illegal migration under successive Conservative and Labour governments, with a record high of 906,000 new arrivals in 2023, according to The Telegraph. In 2022, the census revealed that London and Birmingham had become minority white cities.
In an article on Tuesday, the newspaper cited an analysis by professor Matt Goodwin of Buckingham University, showing that the share of white Britons in the total population of the UK will slide from the current 73% to 57% by 2050. The study predicts they will slip into minority by 2063, and by the end of the century, the white population in the country may shrink to around 33%.
The analysis goes on to project that six in ten people in the UK will be foreign-born or have at least one immigrant parent by the end of the century. The share of Muslims in the UK population is expected to rise from the current 7% to 19.2% within the same period.
Goodwin told The Telegraph that his study factors in migration, as well as birth and death rates among various ethnic and religious groups, based on Office for National Statistics and census data.
The author of the study told the newspaper that his findings raise “enormous questions about the capacity of our country and leaders to unify people around a shared sense of identity, values, ways of life, and culture.”
He also noted that the concerns that his study is liable to spark among many Britons “will need to be recognised, respected and addressed if the UK is to avoid considerable political turbulence and polarisation in the years and decades ahead.”