I was born within 10 years of the end of the second world war. Most of my life in the UK since then I have seen people from overseas coming in while the jobs were pouring out in the other direction. Now we hear predictions that in a hundred years time our population will be iro 120 million.
If we are ever going to return to the full employment of sixties Britain we have to not only stop our population going up any higher in the next hundred years but actually bring it back down to post-WW2 levels.
I don't blame anyone for wanting to come here from a poorer country. I do blame our useless party-politicians on all sides for letting it get so out of hand.
When we had a referendum on membership of the EU nobody warned us that we would have a 7 figure number migrating here from Eastern Europe in a single figure number of years. I very much doubt we would have voted in favour of EU membership if we knew then what we know now.
Leaving the EU would be a disaster. Staying in and continuing to have no control on the number of people coming in from poorer regions of the EU, as has been the case for far too long, will prove to be an even bigger one in the long term.
There should be cross-party involvement in a renegotiation with the EU on this issue (the EU won't take it seriously if it doesn't involve all the parties). We have the pound not the euro, we have generous benefits, and we speak the world's second language (more Hollywood's fault than Shakespeare's I imagine!) and thus we are, through no fault of our own, a special case requiring special protection from the EU for our population and our jobs market.
I we don't get it then we should have a referendum and vote accordingly.