We must put sensible limits on population growth or our environment will pay a heavy price
In a plastic folder in a box in a cupboard that I need a step-ladder to reach lies a piece of yellowed paper that is the most valuable thing I’ve ever owned: my naturalisation certificate. I got it when the South African government took against my father’s political activities, and this country gave my family a home.
A while ago I carried out an informal survey among friends and colleagues — liberal, urban, graduate, professionals — and found that they, too, are mostly of immigrant stock. Only one had no grandparents from abroad. Most were descendants of Jewish refugees or Commonwealth citizens, including Britons who had emigrated to the colonies to make a better life.
I’m sure my origins and those of my tribe influence my attitude to immigration, for it’s not an entirely rational thing. I feel it in my bones. Just as some people are uncomfortable around those with different-coloured skin, I’m uncomfortable surrounded only by white people. When I return to London after spending time in the countryside and see the ethnic mix on the streets, I have a sense of relief. This is my England. I also have a sense of pride. Look at the racial tensions in America or the ethnic segregation in other European capitals: nowhere in the world does a population so mixed live as harmoniously as it does in London. Where are those rivers of blood, Enoch Powell?
My enthusiasm is not just about emotion, for immigration has greatly benefited our country. Our culture is richer for it: so many of our best writers, musicians and artists have foreign origins. Our food is palatable because of it: imagine subsisting on the pap Britons ate before the immigrants turned up. It has made us more prosperous. While 14 per cent of Britons are foreign-born, half of the 100 fastest-growing companies have at least one foreign-born founder. Our health service relies on it: a quarter of NHS staff are foreign-born.
There is no political tribe with which I have less in common than the anti-immigration, xenophobic small-islanders, so I am unwilling to agree with them about anything. And yet I’ve come to believe that there’s too much immigration.
What’s brought me round to this point of view is the conflict between my pro-immigration views and another value I hold dear: protecting the environment. The census figures this week show the population of England and Wales has risen by two thirds over the past century. If it continues to grow at its present rate — 6.3 per cent in the past decade — it will nearly double in the next one. Immigration is responsible for most of the increase, and is the only part of it that policy has much power to affect.
Excluding miniature places like Monaco and Malta, England is already the most densely populated country in Europe after the Netherlands, which is pretty much wall-to-wall suburbs. Because we have crammed so many people on to a small island our biodiversity is among the most depleted in the world. Rising numbers will exacerbate that. Spreading the population more thinly is not an option. People do not come here to live in north Wales or the west of Scotland. They want to live in the southeast of England, where the jobs are.
One way of fitting more people into the country without digging up more of the countryside would be to make cities denser, building higher and cutting down on green space. But that’s not how people want to live. Families want houses and gardens. We already have the smallest homes among comparable countries. It’s not worth espousing a policy with the purpose of boosting economic growth if in order to do so you have to reduce the quality of the thing that most determines people’s living standards — how they are housed.
The conflict between our housing needs and our environment is exacerbating arguments over one of the most contentious issues today: planning. People don’t want their surroundings concreted over in order to accommodate others around them. Slowing the population growth rate won’t solve that problem — we’ll still need more commercial buildings and infrastructure, as well as houses to make up the backlog — but it will mitigate it.
We can, of course, continue to let the population rise at its present rate, as previous generations did. The economy will grow faster than it otherwise would, and the impact on the environment will barely be perceptible in the short term. People will get used to the island being a bit less green, a bit more covered in asphalt, a bit uglier. But we shouldn’t boil future generations like frogs. We should decide what sort of country we want to leave them and design policy accordingly. Which, I fear, means reducing the population growth rate.
This doesn’t mean I’m in favour of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. They deserve more compassion than that, and anyway make up less than a quarter of those who are granted settlement. Nor does it mean reducing the number of people who come here to study. They are temporary visitors who shouldn’t be included in the net-migration figures. But it does mean cutting down on the number admitted to stay for work or family reasons. The Tories’ long-forgotten ambition to cap net migration at 100,000, less than half its present level, seems a reasonable one.
We could mitigate the cost to economic growth by admitting those who have the skills that we most need, and by abandoning the cruel and counterproductive ban on asylum seekers working. But there would be a hit, and hard decisions to make. I fear it’s a price we need to pay.
The Times should be considered a government mouthpiece.
As to the actual point: regardless of immigration, we need to build a fuckload more houses, and infrastructure for them, rapidly. We can, at the same time, provide green spaces and rewilding.
The environment doesn’t stop at UK borders. Climate change, air quality, desertification, acidity in the oceans all affect us here.
We don’t restrict our consumption, pollution or waste management to our borders.
The Environment (and by that, I mean an environment which is capable of sustaining human life, not ‘green space’) trumps nationalism.
Something like 4% of the UK is build on. So we could double our population and only need 4 more percent.
On the other hand, a massive amount of land is used to grow crops no one wants because farmers like subsidies. How about we cut that by 1% of the UKs land, then we can grow the population by 25% without an issue (and build some houses) and we’ll save tax payers money too.
God, I remember when the Times was a decent newspaper.
Absolute shite nowadays, it’s The Sun for those who see themselves as Middle Class.
5 comments
by Emma Duncan
We must put sensible limits on population growth or our environment will pay a heavy price
In a plastic folder in a box in a cupboard that I need a step-ladder to reach lies a piece of yellowed paper that is the most valuable thing I’ve ever owned: my naturalisation certificate. I got it when the South African government took against my father’s political activities, and this country gave my family a home.
A while ago I carried out an informal survey among friends and colleagues — liberal, urban, graduate, professionals — and found that they, too, are mostly of immigrant stock. Only one had no grandparents from abroad. Most were descendants of Jewish refugees or Commonwealth citizens, including Britons who had emigrated to the colonies to make a better life.
I’m sure my origins and those of my tribe influence my attitude to immigration, for it’s not an entirely rational thing. I feel it in my bones. Just as some people are uncomfortable around those with different-coloured skin, I’m uncomfortable surrounded only by white people. When I return to London after spending time in the countryside and see the ethnic mix on the streets, I have a sense of relief. This is my England. I also have a sense of pride. Look at the racial tensions in America or the ethnic segregation in other European capitals: nowhere in the world does a population so mixed live as harmoniously as it does in London. Where are those rivers of blood, Enoch Powell?
My enthusiasm is not just about emotion, for immigration has greatly benefited our country. Our culture is richer for it: so many of our best writers, musicians and artists have foreign origins. Our food is palatable because of it: imagine subsisting on the pap Britons ate before the immigrants turned up. It has made us more prosperous. While 14 per cent of Britons are foreign-born, half of the 100 fastest-growing companies have at least one foreign-born founder. Our health service relies on it: a quarter of NHS staff are foreign-born.
There is no political tribe with which I have less in common than the anti-immigration, xenophobic small-islanders, so I am unwilling to agree with them about anything. And yet I’ve come to believe that there’s too much immigration.
What’s brought me round to this point of view is the conflict between my pro-immigration views and another value I hold dear: protecting the environment. The census figures this week show the population of England and Wales has risen by two thirds over the past century. If it continues to grow at its present rate — 6.3 per cent in the past decade — it will nearly double in the next one. Immigration is responsible for most of the increase, and is the only part of it that policy has much power to affect.
Excluding miniature places like Monaco and Malta, England is already the most densely populated country in Europe after the Netherlands, which is pretty much wall-to-wall suburbs. Because we have crammed so many people on to a small island our biodiversity is among the most depleted in the world. Rising numbers will exacerbate that. Spreading the population more thinly is not an option. People do not come here to live in north Wales or the west of Scotland. They want to live in the southeast of England, where the jobs are.
One way of fitting more people into the country without digging up more of the countryside would be to make cities denser, building higher and cutting down on green space. But that’s not how people want to live. Families want houses and gardens. We already have the smallest homes among comparable countries. It’s not worth espousing a policy with the purpose of boosting economic growth if in order to do so you have to reduce the quality of the thing that most determines people’s living standards — how they are housed.
The conflict between our housing needs and our environment is exacerbating arguments over one of the most contentious issues today: planning. People don’t want their surroundings concreted over in order to accommodate others around them. Slowing the population growth rate won’t solve that problem — we’ll still need more commercial buildings and infrastructure, as well as houses to make up the backlog — but it will mitigate it.
We can, of course, continue to let the population rise at its present rate, as previous generations did. The economy will grow faster than it otherwise would, and the impact on the environment will barely be perceptible in the short term. People will get used to the island being a bit less green, a bit more covered in asphalt, a bit uglier. But we shouldn’t boil future generations like frogs. We should decide what sort of country we want to leave them and design policy accordingly. Which, I fear, means reducing the population growth rate.
This doesn’t mean I’m in favour of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. They deserve more compassion than that, and anyway make up less than a quarter of those who are granted settlement. Nor does it mean reducing the number of people who come here to study. They are temporary visitors who shouldn’t be included in the net-migration figures. But it does mean cutting down on the number admitted to stay for work or family reasons. The Tories’ long-forgotten ambition to cap net migration at 100,000, less than half its present level, seems a reasonable one.
We could mitigate the cost to economic growth by admitting those who have the skills that we most need, and by abandoning the cruel and counterproductive ban on asylum seekers working. But there would be a hit, and hard decisions to make. I fear it’s a price we need to pay.
The Times should be considered a government mouthpiece.
As to the actual point: regardless of immigration, we need to build a fuckload more houses, and infrastructure for them, rapidly. We can, at the same time, provide green spaces and rewilding.
The environment doesn’t stop at UK borders. Climate change, air quality, desertification, acidity in the oceans all affect us here.
We don’t restrict our consumption, pollution or waste management to our borders.
The Environment (and by that, I mean an environment which is capable of sustaining human life, not ‘green space’) trumps nationalism.
Something like 4% of the UK is build on. So we could double our population and only need 4 more percent.
On the other hand, a massive amount of land is used to grow crops no one wants because farmers like subsidies. How about we cut that by 1% of the UKs land, then we can grow the population by 25% without an issue (and build some houses) and we’ll save tax payers money too.
God, I remember when the Times was a decent newspaper.
Absolute shite nowadays, it’s The Sun for those who see themselves as Middle Class.