The Slog examines the cost, ecological and rabid consumption issues surrounding the human species….which is three times more numerous on the planet that it was in 1955. Applying this to the UK and Brexit issues surrounding immigration, he concludes that only a deranged ideologist would wish to make our social complexities even worse. This subject is about far more than immigration levels: but it is folly to think we can stay with the border controls as they are.
These are the standard arguments against more immigration into the UK:
- We’re overcrowded as it is: Britain is being paved over
- Home-grown religious nutters are always a potential outcome
- Our health and benefits systems are already struggling
- Multiculturalism has a lousy track-record.
My main problem with our population size isn’t among them, but I’m used to being contrarian – and quantitative opinion measurements do not prove the majority is right: historically, in fact, the majority is usually wrong. But taking each of the above arguments in turn:
Overcrowding. Sheer physical space needn’t be a problem if you have plenty of agricultural land to go round. We don’t: our home grown food and population density are in the Big 3 of Europe for being low and high percentages respectively. The Conservatives are riding a coach and six through every planning law in the UK, when they could use brown infill for building – which would also mean losing eyesores. (And as for fracking, don’t get me started).
Fundamentalism. The Home Office estimates that there are already 15,000 Jihadists at work in Britain. Typically, May doesn’t know whereTF they are, or who they are. Suffice to say, they do not wish us well. We should never have joined Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ and we should get out of NATO and Syria. But that doesn’t alter the fact that, even beyond violence and atrocities, radical Islam is not socially tolerant and does not share British values. So yes, it’s an issue: but if the Foreign and Home Offices knew which way is up, it would not be the potential future problem it clearly is.
Struggling Infrastructure. I don’t think anyone doubts that our health, welfare and State pension systems are cracking under pressure. That said, they’re under pressure because an ideologically constipated Government with no moral compass has decided they should be. Whatever Osborne, Altmann and Crabb do or don’t say to the Waspi Women, for example, the DWP/Treasury apex of incompetence chose those women as ‘an easy target’. But still, the point remains that if new immigrants are going to add to social costs, then we should wait until we’ve done the right thing by our own citizens before letting any more into Britain….I exclude humanitarian emergencies from that, be they of our making or not: but leaving the EU would lay us less open to other country’s cockups – as indeed would dumping NATO.
If those coming in fill an identified need, for the moment I would say fine, take them. But plan NOW to retrain the vast reservoir of under and unemployed UK citizens we already have.
Multiculturalism is an historic mistake. Oh dear, there – I’ve said it. I think our multi-ethnic society works well so long as ethnicities continue to celebrate their cultures without insisting society as a whole adopts them. Ultimately, however, every British citizen needs to sign up to one set of laws, and one set of liberal democratic principles. There is already educational choice in the UK (although it’s being undermined) and we don’t need any more. I am just as opposed our educational balance being undermined by privately-funded colleges as I am to Sharia schools – or Hissadic Schule for that matter – if they aim to usurp our supposedly depoliticised mainstream education models.
Ireland, Nigeria and India were not freak accidents, they are lessons to be learned…by everyone from imperialists and racists to fanatics and social anthropologists.
As I wrote at the outset, my objections to further immigration into the UK are much bigger than the above four put together. It’s merely part of my overall global view: as a species, there are far too bloody many of us.
The background to that view is not based on the one-dimensional, linear points often made about food, land space, or even water – although water supply maintenance will be an enormous problem in the medium term future.
Rather, it is to do with ecological balance, conservation, and the costly complications of running huge population sizes.
Homo sapiens is not as anti-Earth – yet – as the African elephant, but it is and aways has been rapacious in its consumption of every raw material from wood to energy. We are also pollutant on a number of levels: setting aside CO2 (about which I remain sceptical) we create human and other less biodegradable waste on a -literally – industrial scale.
And as for species fecundity and safety from predators, our numbers have trebled in the last 60 years. We have benefited enormously from technology and medical science, but these allow us to live even longer, have a far higher chance of reaching adulthood, and make us addicted to consumption of the pharma and comms products resulting from those advances.
The average Australian crocodile’s chances of becoming an adult are 1 in 14 million. Excellent you might think – but ours globally are 4 in 5: and we are infinitely more destructive than your croc.
Above all, the range of genetic influences, cultural mores, priorities, interests and anti-social behaviours that result from a populous, introspective thug species are hugely complex and unbelievably expensive. Worse still, our bureaucrats and politicians opt every time for the lowest common denominator “solution” to these complicated social groups: criminal reoffending alone has brought the judicial system to its knees, but there are endless studies proving how retraining and ‘tough love’ regimes can divide the reoffending rate by seven.
Further, we do not respond well to living in crowded conditions: if we did then we would be unique among higher primates. Violence and road rage rates in cities right across the West are far higher than they are in areas of lower population density.
So slotting that Weltanschauung back into the micro situation of Britain, I think a worsening of city crowding – alongside declining living conditions and incomes – would be an insane aim. I would like to see the Home Counties/London bias go, government vastly more devolved, and far more power given to local communities. But chiefly, I’d always support moves to heavily penalise (in tax terms) larger families; and for myself – although I recognise it is a drastic policy – while we have the time to retrain our own population – I would stop all immigration immediately.
That drastic move is only necessary because forty years of dilatory political correctness have made it so. And as we would not have the freedom to do that while remaining in the EU, it is one of the 187 other reasons I have already compiled for getting out on June 23rd.
The Slog 