April 2007
Come on, this isn't rocket science. Countries have a certain area and from that comes a certain, finite amount of food, fuel, other crops, space to live and wilderness for plants and animals. To formulate policies for imigration, transport, taxation and everything else on a short-term economic basis, with no population policy ... is madness!
One thing we can learn from history is that everything eventually changes; in fact, every living thing is in a continual state of change. Why then, should we assume that we can go on indefinately importing goods of strategic national importance in such vast amounts?
Oil, Gas, Food, Clothes, Consumer items... pretty much lots of everything is imported to the UK now, even if we also make it ourselves too. In fact, if we could import more space for our crowded cities, roads and airports, we would probably do that as well. Quite a lot of that list is nonrenewable too, and much renewable technology that we could be developing and manufacturing is being done elsewhere - in places where governments take renewable energy seriously, supporting its universal adoption.
If you have ever flown over the UK on a clear day, you can see that, despite the country seeming crowded, it actually has huge uninhabited areas. Despite this, we are told that if everyone lived at the UK standard of living, we would need about 2.5 Earths. So, taking the UK standard of living as something we or anyone else probably wouldn't want to lose too much of, that figures as a need to reduce the Earth's total population to something like 2 billion rather than 6 billion. Every country needs to do something, otherwise the ones which don't will simply be exporting poor young people to fill up the rest of the World.
The UK imports people from almost the whole of the rest of the World, making it one of the most cosmopolitan and dynamic countries in the World; London is now apparently THE city to live in for the super-rich, a more 'happening' place than New York. Much of this is down to Great Britain's language, and karma as a former overt colonial power and now major base for corporate world domination. But we export people too. And have sex and reproduce. As in the rest of the World, most British people are enslaved by jobs, taxes and debt, yet have sufficient education, money and access to contraception, to have a nonreplacing birthrate - below two per couple. Some religious, racial and ethnic groups however, including Muslims and Catholics, encourage and deliver a higher-than-replacement birth rate, with larger families the norm. Although you can make a good religious or spiritual case for having sex only for procreation, this is only really feasable for the most spiritually advanced and committed. For the millions and billions of followers, large families and unrestricted births ultimately result in an impoverished ecology and society.
A large Muslim population growth is changing the ethnic and social balance of Western Europe, with many resultant tensions, particularly as the non-Muslim population looks to the East and sees brutal dictatorships like Iran and Saudi Arabia, with Sharia law, beheadings, wars, repression of the nonstate religion, and generally a very shabby record on human rights. From an outsider's point of view, admittedly, it feels like Islam is fighting the Christian wars of the middle ages all over again, between Shias, Sunnis and westerners instead of Catholics and Protestants. Of course many of Arabia's problems can be laid right at the feet of Idiot Bush, Liar Blair, their predecessors, and the rest of those clueless so-called 'leaders', with their moronic and criminal invasions of distant countries.
How would a government calculate how many people can fit in a country like the British Isles?
They should ask a university or three to do studies, and put the results into a spreadsheet so that people could experiment with the various parameters such as vegetarian versus omnivourous diet, average energy and water usage and so on. Put like this, I don't see how people could argue with the stark facts. It would surely become a fairly self-evident truth that the country could support however many millions of people long-term. And from sources available today, that figure would probably be much below our current 65 million or so population, despending on diet. A vegetarian diet hugely reduces human footprint.
How would population be reduced to a sustainable level?
This isn't even an easy question for the brutal dictatorship of China, far less so for a boiled-frog government looking farsitedly at an election on four or five years time. Abortion would not help, except perhaps indirectly as a karmic cause of war. In fact, if the problem is left to fester, that is exactly what will happen: War and economic collapse, as the Universe fails to provide for, or put another way, deals with, an out-of-control human population. We have several nonexclusive options: Population control, War, Famine or Disease.
If the UK were to show unilateral success in realising a sustainable population level then, in an ironic act of natural balance, it would become a more desirable place to live, and thus attract more immigrants. Hence the only mileage in unilateral success would be to prove a pilot programme for the rest of the World: show what could be done.
One of the most obvious things to do would be to offer carrots - enhanced child benefit for a first child, payment for sterilisation after one or two children, and sticks - paying child benefit at a reduced or zero rate after one or two children. This would have to be implemented as part of a massive rationalization of our crazily complex tax/benefit system. And would raise a massive problem: child poverty, the abolition of which the current Labour government regards as pretty much a sacrosanct duty, however bad they are at it. Can you imagine the political difficulties of saying "If you have three or more children, you may end up in poverty and substandard conditions. The state will not help you." This isn't India. People have been used to a pretty-much unconditional state safety net for the past sixty years; the whole of most people's lives.
It would also be necessary to outlaw embrionic sex tests and ultrascans except in the most exceptional circumstances, which is actually what they were invented for in the first place. Female infanticide, as practiced widely in China and India, results in huge social problems and an aggressive population of young males, unable to marry and willing to fight. Really Really bad karma man.
Another possibly more palatable method of making population levels sustainable would be to make society at large live more sustainably in terms of diet, energy and materials consumption and so on.
The least unfair method of setting immigration quotas would simply be to match the previous year's emigration, or if birth rates really tumbled, to allow a small excess. Of course there's a lot of devil in that detail, by the time you've figured in human rights, genuine asylum cases, illegal immigration and disappeared deportees.
These proposed measure are brutal. But the consequences of overpopulation are far more so - Species Dieoff.
