Act axe concerns

estimated at 180,000, a minimal drop from 184,000 the previous year.

Immigration minister Robert Goodwill has insisted reducing the number of migrants coming to the UK will be a priority for the withdrawal negotiations. But there are ultimately no guarantees and free movement could prove the price for access to the single market.

All of that said, this debate should be and is about more than statistics. It is also about the UK’s social fabric.

Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said this week that the UK’s relationship with Ireland and the former colonies had long been key factors in shaping its migrant population.

In recent years, the EU had played a similar role, she said, although with the UK’s forthcoming departure, this will likely change again in the future.

Tied up with all of this, there’s also the question of identity and how immigrants view themselves.

It will be interesting to see in the post-Brexit era whether people will so easily relate to the historically supra-ethnic British identity.

Of course many of those lately settled in Scotland – where emigration has traditionally been the issue – have found a distinct nationalist identity more appealing.

And yet – with the economic uncertainty in the wake of Brexit – could we now start to see more of the so-called new Scots moving on? THERESA MAY is coming under pressure to explain the Government’s handling of plans to scrap the Human Rights Act.

The new Prime Minister has said she’ll press ahead with the move but it is unclear what the planned Bill of Rights replacement would look like and whether Holyrood could veto it.

SNP MSP Ben Macpherson said: “May’s plan is fast becoming a weight around her neck as the Tories become fixated on one of their ideological pet projects at the expense of the rest of the country.”