Independent Newspaper Letters Column 23 September, 2009.
Mark Steel's column on 9 September, "The Poles might be leaving but the prejudice remains" claimed that most of the apocalyptic warnings of an Eastern European take-over could be traced back to the organisation Migrationwatch. On the contrary, we have been saying for over a year now that we expect East European migration to come back into balance in a few years' time.
He further asserted that we have declared that the UK population is still destined to rise to an unsustainable 80 million in the next 40 years. In fact, we always stick closely to the principal population projection prepared by the Office for National Statistics. That gives a UK population of 78.6 million in 2056.
Finally he attributes our view to "millions coming from Africa. He is putting a gloss on a paper we produced on world trends which was based firmly on the UN medium projection of the world population (2008).
None of this could be described as "prejudiced", which is an unjustified slur.
Chairman, Migrationwatch UK.
