Can you blame young people like me for fleeing Britain?

Katie Strick, The Independent

A funny thing happens when you leave the UK. You pack your life into a suitcase, feeling like you’re doing something brave and intrepid. You sign up for an exotic new routine of ocean swims and expat run clubs. Then — if you move to Sydney like I did last year — you realise half your fellow runners are British lawyers, doctors and civil servants who probably lived a few streets from you in London and that perhaps the whole thing wasn’t so brave or intrepid after all.

I moved to Sydney a month after my 31st birthday last September, one of tens of thousands of Brits to take advantage of the Aussie government upping the British working holiday visa age limit to 35. Turns out I’m hardly an outlier.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), net migration to the UK has dropped by two-thirds in a single year because young people like me are leaving the country in droves — 87,000 aged 16-24 left, as did 87,000 aged 25-34. That is no country for young people. The figures come just months after a think tank found more than half of young people have considered leaving Britain under Labour, with government leaders now concerned about a “brain drain” among talented and ambitious twenty- and thirty-somethings.

And can you really blame us? Rachel Reeves announced her Budget on Wednesday, which is expected to hike taxes and force private rental prices up even further. London’s rents reached a record high this month as Britain’s housing crisis deepens. UK unemployment is currently the highest it’s been in a decade as AI steals half of the traditional grad jobs. And quality of life for young people in the UK seems to be plummeting by the day, with overpriced accommodation and crumbling public services.

London in particular seems to be at the centre of friends’ discussions about the quality of life in the UK not being what it used to be. “There used to be a real buzz about London but it feels like no one can afford to enjoy it anymore,” an old flatmate WhatsApped me last week. Her friends in tech, finance and PR are all leaving for Mexico, Dubai and Australia — what’s the point of paying through her teeth to live there anymore?

I sent her a picture of my lunchtime view and told her to come on over — it’s the best decision I ever made. I didn’t own a property or a car or any of the luxuries my parents had at my age when I left London, a city I romanticised when I moved there a decade ago from the rural shires. I was desperate to run away by the end.

The drilling and motorbikes and screeching of the Northern line took a toll on my body. Travelling anywhere seemed to involve a train or a bus that was packed, broken or running late — and for what? I couldn’t afford a mortgage or a decent quality of life in the parts of the city I actually liked anymore. I figured I may as well live somewhere sunny and be paid in experiences (yes, all the cliches about taking the ferry to work and swimming with turtles at lunchtime are true).

A new friend, cousin or ex-colleague seems to be moving here every week, citing the same push factors of crime, housing and affordability the rest of us did when we left London. No wonder. “It’s so refreshing not having to look after your shoulder all the time,” a mate working in finance said over our 6am coffee here the other day, a month into emigrating. For him, it was Australia’s relative safety and low crime rate that tipped the balance. He’d lived in London for a decade, and realised his body had been in fight-or-flight mode that entire time.

A pal who moved to Seville for a year says she struggles to see herself returning now she’s discovered the laidback Spanish lifestyle. Another says she’ll stay in Dubai until the UK fixes its crime and taxation crises. And of the three housemates I lived with before leaving my last houseshare in Balham, all are planning to escape the UK in the coming months. Liberals I know are moving to Texas. That’s how sick they are with Britain.

Expat pals who assumed they’d move back to the UK for the having-kids chapter are now increasingly choosing to stay, coaxed by the quality of life and better access to healthcare. Recent changes like VAT on private school fees have hardly made raising a child in the UK appealing. Two friends who recently visited Australia with their newborns have said they’re tempted to emigrate — especially if they can coax their own parents out for a chunk of each year to help with childcare.

Word must be getting around, because now it’s the Aussies, too, who seem to be adding to the UK’s new net migration statistics. I can hardly blame them. You live in Australia for the lifestyle and the UK for the people, or so is the general agreement among Brits on social media these days. If my family lived in paradise, staying in my life by the beach down under would be a no-brainer, too.