Perhaps it might help if you read what I said
I'm having difficulty finding where I said that the population declined. Perhaps your superior powers of reasoning could be employed in tracking it down for me.
Tbf I think people moving away from the area looking for work might have something to do with that.
Population has increased everywhere, if the population has stayed the same then there will have been net migration from the area.
In which case then there has been a 10% increase simply due to births exceeding deaths. You would expect Wakefield to be broadly in line with this and have at least 5% growth. Hence a population that remained the same would be indicative of a net migration away from the district.
New housing per se isn't a necessarily indicative of a growth in population since there has been a fall in the average number of people in one house due to changes in society e,g, increase in divorce rates.
You continually bash the drum of net migration away from an area, net migration away means decline, it means more people moved away than moved in.
This has been shown anecdotally and then statistically to be billy ###### but you are now trying to argue that what you said is not what you said, which still doesn't get away from the point that Martyn made about some mining areas doing better now than when the mines were open before Thatcher came to power.
Maybe it's Martyn's slight resemblance to Gerry Adams, they both have beards after all, and the fact that this wasn't in the Guardian that is confusing you.