It's a gold rush for the emigration industry. The Office for National Statistics' figures show more British citizens left the UK in 2006 - 207,000 - than in any year since records began in 1991: 49,000 for new lives in Australia, 71,000 upped sticks for EU countries, mainly Spain and France, and 16,000 to the US.

More and more people hanker to move abroad. A 2006 BBC survey found that 13 per cent of 1,000 people asked were planning to emigrate in the near future, twice the number who wanted to leave when the same question was asked three years before.

Yet the British press and politicians have been so mesmerised by the rising number of non-British nationals arriving - which the ONS recently showed had swelled to 510,000 immigrants in 2006, double the number a decade ago - that the British exodus has been ignored.

Of course, emigrating Brits are nothing new. At the height of its imperial power in the 19th century, Britain experienced mass migration not only to colonies and dominions such as India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa but also to countries with colonial connections, such as the US.

Professor Tim Hatton, a labour market economist from Essex University, estimates the annual emigration rate in the years before the first world war at around 5.3 UK citizens out of every 1,000, though this included a disproportionately high share of Irish emigrants when Ireland was part of the UK.

Even today, according to Jim Hammerton, emeritus professor at Melbourne's La Trobe University, who has written extensively on the history of migration, Brits are cashing in on the "colonial dividend", empire having established "common language and family ties to countries".

A couple at the Emigrate fair support Professor Hammerton's observation. The woman, in her late 30s, pacifying her toddler with an apple, tells me her parents came to Britain from India in the 1960s, and her husband had lived in Australia as a child for 10 years before they met: "I know it's possible to uproot a family and be happy."

Brits are departing their home country in greater numbers than the French or Americans.

The Institute for Public Policy Research estimated that 5.5m British nationals, or just over 9 per cent of the UK population, were living overseas permanently in 2006. It dwarfs the number of French living overseas, which is only about 1.2m, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Yet even the French eclipse the Americans: the OECD finds 1.2m US-born citizens, out of a population of 300m, live overseas, making the US diaspora proportionally much smaller than the French or British.

While the legacy of empire has provided Brits with some choice destinations, this alone can't explain the difference. Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, IPPR's director of research strategy, suggests the British are more outward-facing than other nationalities: "Brits care about international issues - it's in British newspapers. Whereas American and French societies are more insular." This, he says, helps explain why Britain has, in relative terms, one of the largest diasporas in the world.

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