Britannia Radio

From The Sunday Times

August 30, 2009

The truth in black and white: there are too many of us

Rod Liddle

Net immigration to Britain last year was only 118,000, the lowest it has been for many years. This is presumably a consequence of the immigrants we’ve received over the past 10 years finally getting their mobile phones charged up and being able to tell their friends and relatives back home how ghastly it is here.

Many have already gone back, sadly shaking their heads and now prepared to put up with the familiar iniquities of their countries of origin — famine, disease, plagues of locusts, overzealous secret police, no work — rather than remain in a country where Harriet Harman is leader of the House of Commons and Jim Naughtie is in charge of the Booker prize.

Still, 118,000 is not a figure to be sniffed at; it is a large number of people (about the population of Ipswich), the majority of whom will settle in the southeast of England, now Europe’s most densely populated area.

The headlines announced that Britain’s total population was now well over 61m, with 791,000 people born last year, and that increased fertility was primarily the reason for our terrifyingly rapid expansion of population, rather than immigration. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper; one quarter of those 791,000 babies were born to people who were themselves not born in Britain — a staggering number when you consider that people not born in Britain constitute only 8% of the population.

So immigration, both direct and by proxy, is still the main weapon in our valiant fight to reach the 100m mark around about Easter 2112, by which time we will all be stacked horizontally in warehouses on wooden pallets, like in those weird Japanese hotels, and eating one another.

There are plenty of learned people around who worry that Britons — and Europeans in general — are being rapidly outbred in their homelands and will soon constitute a minority in their “own” countries. I don’t much care, frankly, who is stacked above me snoring on one of those pallets (so long as it is not a Belgian); it is the sheer weight of numbers I find alarming. The quicker the problem of overpopulation can be uncoupled from alarmist racial rhetoric, the more likely we are to address the real problem.

The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) think tank reckons Britain’s population should be somewhere between 17m and 27m, although it has not, to my knowledge, recommended a cull (if it ever does, I can give it a few names to start with). But there seems to be a strong link between that level of population density and economic and social wellbeing. Leicester University’s “map of world happiness”, based on subjective wellbeing, identifies the happiest areas as the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Scandinavia.

It is true that Scandinavians seem to expend an awful lot of energy trying to kill themselves, but, it would seem from such studies, they are very happy doing so. The overwhelming majority of countries in the top 10 of the United Nations’ human development index are also places where the population density is much as the OPT recommends for Britain. We are happier in ourselves when we are not crowded, when we have space to move around.

That is why the affluent flee our crowded cities in larger numbers every year, heading for the suburbs or the increasingly distant areas of open countryside. We don’t have the infrastructure to cope with a population growth rate of 0.7% per year — that’s more than three times the rate of growth during the 1980s.

Our health service, our schools, our prisons, our roads and railways struggle to cope with existing demands; the pressure to pave over more and more countryside greatly increases flood risk. Nobody seems terribly worried — fearing that to address the issue of population growth will lead to some infraction of political correctness.

+ Now even the Swiss cattle are at it. Somewhere high in the Alps, cows have decided that they’ve had enough and have begun throwing themselves from the tops of mountains. Mystified local police in the Swiss village of Lauterbrunnen are having to clear away piles of the dead beasts — a consequence, they suggest, of mass suicide.

Well, whose fault is that? Encourage your human population to pop their clogs at the slightest opportunity and the animals will soon follow suit. And cows do not usually have the collateral for amenable clinics such as Dignitas.

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