This article was originally published in The Cambridge Student.
“Britain is full” is a phrase associated with xenophobes, but it shouldn’t be.
Britain has a population of over 60 million people. Imagine Britain with a population of 100m. Or 200m. This would be the eventual long term result of Labour’s perpetual population growth policy. It is inevitable if the population continues to grow.
We would be much better off with a population even lower than it is now, for three main reasons: house prices, the environment and space.
Everyone needs somewhere to live, and are forced to pay whatever it takes. A roof doesn’t have many substitutes. Space is finite, and houses can’t be built fast enough. As a result, more and more houses will be split into flats, because this will always be more profitable. When houses are built, this is partly on previously green land. New accommodation is smaller, less pleasant and more expensive. House prices will continue to rise faster than inflation and wages unless the population stops growing, and high house prices hit poor people the most. A population much lower than the number of houses there are would cause house prices to plummet. Excess land could be used for better things, to benefit the population. Without an increasing population, houses can be passed on to the next generation, so people wouldn’t have to spend most of their lives working to pay off a mortgage.
Want to halve the pollution caused by people living in Britain? Halve the population. This has the advantage of reducing pollution around the world, such as pollution from production in China caused by our consumption. It’s an environmental policy that doesn’t just encourage us to export pollution. The Optimum Population Trust believes that the earth may only be able to support 3 billion people in the long run, so the UK’s sustainable population is 30 million or lower. This would reduce our GDP (by half, of course), but there is no reason to believe it would reduce the measure that matters: GDP per capita.
A halved population would also just be more pleasant. Nowadays, there is less space in cities and less space in the countryside. Transport congestion is just one of the effects of a increasing population. What would Britain be like with a population density more like France? Nice.
So how do we go about reducing our population without resorting to coercion? We must act now. All delay makes it harder to reach 30m (this is a very long-term policy). I do not advocate forcing anyone to do anything: Sanjay Gandhi’s 1977 forcible sterilisation of the poor in India was an infringement of liberty, and backfired by causing a long-lasting resentment of family planning policies. We mustn’t get so focused on reaching the target that we are willing to do anything to get there.
Promote family planning and birth control. Promote abortion: make them as easy as possible to get.
Get rid of child benefit: phase it out over 18 years and nine months. People who have already had children should continue to receive it, but all new births should not. Child credit makes it easier to afford children, and tips the balance for some people when deciding whether to have children or not. This policy has the added benefit of increasing the proportion of children being born into happier circumstances.
Net emigration. UK population growth from births is predicted to peak around 2020. In the meantime, we can reduce the population by making sure that emigration is more than immigration. This shouldn’t be difficult: in 2006, 400,000 people emigrated, but almost 600,000 immigrated. We can just cap immigration at 350,000, and implement a points system to get the most skilled immigrants.
It is sometimes argued that immigrants do not affect the environment because they do not increase the number of people on earth. However, immigration reduces the pressure on other countries to reduce their populations, so ultimately encourages population growth. There are other advantages to a lower population anyway.
Increasing population is the biggest issue facing the world and Britain today. For some reason, mentioning this seems to be taboo amongst Labour and the Liberal Democrats. David Cameron recently broke this with a speech “The challenges of a growing population” (29th October 2007). It will be interesting to see whether the Conservatives will do what needs to be done.
Tags: immigration