29 Comments

• Letters From A Tory 26th Mar '08 - 9:40am

  Glad to hear it.

  http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

• asquith 26th Mar '08 - 9:40am

  I can’t help thinking he had a point, in a way. It’s pointless trying to deny that the world in general, and this country in particular, is overcrowded. We can’t go on unsustainably knocking out more kids, buying more pointless “consumer” goods, building more roads, houses and sheds (warehouses). Yes, immigration should be restricted. But also, people who live here should have less children. And surely it’s the ones who rely on state handouts, who are least able to give their children a future and turn them into productive members of society, who should be breeding less.

• F W 26th Mar '08 - 9:58am

  Actually, isnt it better that the unproductive members of society do something useful like have children, rather than it taking up the time and energy of those who would otherwise be out creating business and generating wealth?

• Grammar Police 26th Mar '08 - 10:09am

  @ Asquith, I’m pleased to hear that I’m not a “productive member of society”.

  Btw, it should be *fewer* children, not less.

• Alix 26th Mar '08 - 10:11am

  Asquith, I can’t help feeling you’re trying to be provocatively illiberal and horrifying on purpose, in which case, I bite.

  You have to separate out the possible problem of overcrowding in the UK from the “solution” being advocated here. There is an apparently non-partisan organisation called the Optimum Population Trust dedicated to discussing this problem, but unless they’ve turned into a bunch of Nazis since last time I looked, sterilisation is not one of the options.

  The feeling of the world running mad, getting out of hand and producing too much of everything is part of the perpetual human condition. I could show you fourteenth-century chronicles complaining in much the same terms. It’s just a natural individual response to the complexity of wider society which can’t ever be understood and predicted by one person. But to take your sustainability points one by one anyway, what do children have to do with consumer goods? You’ve said in the past you’re an economic liberal – the one thing you should be in favour of is to allow the market in consumer goods to regulate itself. Fine if you want to place restrictions on it in the name of a wider cause like the environment, but not in the name of some moral sense of there being “too much”. Your position bizarrely contains echoes of Leninism as well as Nazism here.

  “And surely it’s the ones who rely on state handouts…”

  I’m getting increasingly sick of supposed liberals peddling this line, as if people on benefits are one great unwashed “them”. I’m on benefits, so does that mean any children I have won’t be productive members of society? And before you say, “That’s different”… how?

• Sesenco 26th Mar '08 - 10:30am

  Gosh. Sir Sheath Joseph got himself into trouble for saying something much like this.

  The moral right speaks with a forked tongue on this issue.

  On the one hand, they express a perfectly legitimate concern that the birth rate tends to be highest among those with the lowest IQs, and among those dependent on the state (ie, taking money from the rest of us).

  On the other hand, among their number are those like Ratzinger and Murphy-O’Connor who say that everybody should have as many children as possible.

  The left insists that everyone is born with the same IQ, differences in intelligence being a product of environment only, so the problem for them is the inadequacy of state benefits.

• asquith 26th Mar '08 - 10:52am

  Sorry, I came across a bit poorly in that earlier post. I don’t necessarily demonise people who are on benefits: I myself have been unemployed in the past. I’m just saying that there is overpopulation, and that some people have children they can’t provide for, and they should exercise personal restraint. I didn’t say that I agreed there should be forcible sterilisation, because I certainly don’t hold such views. I’m just saying that it isn’t necessarily evil to think there are too many of us.

• asquith 26th Mar '08 - 10:53am

  I did have an inkling that writing that post would prove to be a mistake.

• Alix 26th Mar '08 - 11:29am

  “I’m just saying that it isn’t necessarily evil to think there are too many of us.”

  I’m certainly with you there. There’s the argument that scientific advances could render the question immaterial if we learn to manipulate resources better – though I don’t hold out massive hope for this as the market will not necessarily like the kind of scientific advances that increase resources and drive down prices.

  Never mind, there’ll soon be a flu pandemic.

• asquith 26th Mar '08 - 11:38am

  Yes, Alix. If the world’s population carries on increasing, there will in the end be some massive catastrophe that wipes out billions. To suggest that technology can go on feeding us all is just facile.

  But I don’t want that to happen. I want the whole business to be nipped in the bud now. Only the correct answer is proper education. I don’t believe that the poor are somehow inferior: rather, low expectations and piss-poor services have betrayed them. But whatever the causes, some people are having children they can’t provide for.

• Pete 26th Mar '08 - 11:49am

  Fruitcakes like this normally end up joining UKIP.

  I can recall 2 or 3 occaisions when a tory councillor has said something, normally racist – and then they jump ship to UKIP.

  UKIP is a handy bin for all tory trash!

• Cheltenham Robin 26th Mar '08 - 1:02pm

  I have to admit that I haven’t read the full text of what this councillor was saying but shouldn’t we be defending his right to say it?

• sanbikinoraion 26th Mar '08 - 2:04pm

  asquith: I disagree that education is the only correct answer. The current government has left a lot of the young poor in the situation where, for the same money they can either work in Tesco doing mind-numbing, foot-aching work OR raise a child. I know which I’d choose.

  If we really do have a problem with overpopulation AND we think that the rich should be producing the children then we should change the incentives currently available for the raising of children.

  I’m not saying that that’s what I think is the right thing to do, just that it is the incentives that have to change to get what you want.

• David Morton 26th Mar '08 - 2:41pm

  I’ve read the original comments in quotation marks in the Mail article. The single word “Compulsory” turns it from a silly rant into something the Nazi’s would do. Lots of people say things they regret on Blogs and he should have made a grovelling apology and that would be the end of it. If not and he really believes that then he should have been thrown out of the Conservative Party. I suppose the interesting point would be wether the people of his ward would have been entitled to re elect him. Is he worse than the BNP which we haven’t banned|?

• Steve Cooke 26th Mar '08 - 3:11pm

  I hear lots of people saying that Britain is overcrowded. I’d really like to know what that means. What’s the capacity of Britain? Where’s the instruction manual that come with the country that tells us how many people it should have at optimum levels? Saying that Britain is full is an easy thing to say – proving it might be a little more difficult. My experience is that when people say that Britain’s too crowded (usually before saying that they plan to emigrate to Australia) they’re actually using the phrase to mean something different and that very often their implication is race or ethnicity related. I am not accusing asquith of this (however I am accusing him of sloppy thinking).

• Sesenco 26th Mar '08 - 3:21pm

  Steve Cooke, the Housebuilders’Federation will be reading your post with glee. You are putting ideas into their heads. Now they can accuse people objecting to the despoilation of the environment not just of being middle-class nimbies who hate progress, but wicked “Daily Mail” reading racists to boot.

  No, we are not in the least bit interested in protecting the countryside, we just want to keep blacks out of it. And it isn’t the Green Belt, it is the White Belt.

  Strange alliances indeed!

• Steve Cooke 26th Mar '08 - 3:30pm

  I await the forthcoming deluge of mail from the Housebuilders’ Federation with eager anticipation. When they do write to me I shall point them to the thousands of empty and derelict houses and empty flats in the constituency I live in.

• Julian H 26th Mar '08 - 3:59pm

  I’m with Cooke.

• asquith 26th Mar '08 - 5:24pm

  Steve Cooke, void properties are void because people don’t want to live in the areas in question, because they are owned by landlords, housing associations and councils which can’t find tenants, or because the owners are waiting for prices to rise and won’t sell/let.

  Short of some kind of government compulsion (which I would hope none of us support) people will not be living there and those who move to new homes will be inhabiting Barratt boxes in suburbs and rural areas. That means building on farmland, forest (the proposed Heathrow runway is on an ancient wood, for example), and so on.

  Now I happen not to want building to spread all over the countryside, if it’s all the same to you. Yes, the term “overcrowded” is somewhat subjective, but if you’ll visit the page “List of countries by population density” on Wikipedia you’ll see that few large states have our population density: comparable countries such as France and the USA have far less population pressure.

  Are you really comfortable and easy with the thought of there being 70 million people on these islands?

• sanbikinoraion 26th Mar '08 - 9:52pm

  Urban areas account for, what, 15% of UK landmass? So how crowded are we, really? And how much is artificial crowding due to the restrictions on building on green belt?

• Oranjepan 26th Mar '08 - 10:53pm

  Over-population – that’s quite an opinion if ever I heard one! I guess it depends on where you live and what the demographic pressures on your community are…

  How come it’s always poor or undesirable people who are the over-populators? I find it hilarious that the social-climbers can never have enough servants in their entourage, yet they begrudge every penny they pay for the service.

  But no, the underlying question is about equitable levels of state investment, not the types of individual behaviour we should tolerate or try to control.

• Sesenco 26th Mar '08 - 11:21pm

  Does anyone recall Mr Nicholas Dribley, the chain-smoking Old Etonian who once served as Thatcher’s Environment Secretary?

  Yes, this was the Nicholas Dribley who told people living in villages who objected to new housing that they were being “selfish” (Dribley was a free-marketeer opposed to any kind of planning or environmental controls). Yet, when someone proposed to build a bungalow at the end of Dribley’s back garden in the Cotswolds, Dribley objected!

  Labour’s record on the environment is mixed. On the plus side there is the designation of the New Forest and North Downs as national parks, and the financial incentives that have persuaded hundreds of farmers to replant hedgerows. On the minus side, we have the steady relaxation of planning controls and the drive towards airport expansion.

  All of which takes us some distance from a Conservative councillor’s OTT rant.

  There is a minority of feckless people who live on state benefits, smoke, chew gum and watch trashy TV all day. And they tend to breed more prolifically than the rest of us. No doubt about it.

  Overall, the birth rate in the UK and most of Europe is so low that is is barely replacing itself. That is a concern, particularly to those who worry about immigration and fear for the future of European civilisation (lots of them in Germany).

  Professor Peter Hall has suggested building a mega airport in the Thames Estuary and filling the Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted sites with buy-to-let flats and social housing. Trouble is, it would be hugely expensive, and you have the problem of the geese that put the kibosh up Maplin.

• Mark Wright 27th Mar '08 - 12:20am

  This is the point at which a LVT disciple like me pops up and says:
  “LVT would put pressure on landlords to either use empty homes or sell them to someone who can, and in the process would raise cash fairly for local/national govt to use.”

  But since you are Liberals you knew that was coming.

• Alix Mortimer 27th Mar '08 - 12:35am

  “Are you really comfortable and easy with the thought of there being 70 million people on these islands?”

  Um, yes? Why shouldn’t I be? The onus is on anyone who believes this to persuade the rest of us that some arbitrary number plucked out of thin air is “too many”. On what are you basing this calculation?

• Ian Ridley 27th Mar '08 - 11:15am

  For those who want to read the original comments first-hand I have found Google’s cache of the page, which may disappear soon: http://tinyurl.com/2cmz36

• Matthew Huntbach 27th Mar '08 - 5:10pm

  It’s very easy to say silly things without thinking too much, or if placed under pressure for a quick reply. I do not think we should hound people into resignation for it. I am sorry Cllr Ward felt it necessary to resign. Politics is worsened if people keep their mouths shut for fear they might say something they would regret, or feel they can only mouth party-approved platitudes which have been policed for non-offensiveness.

  As a minor point to Sesenco, the RC position is not actually that people should have as many children as possible. I face a problem with this sort of thing, because coming from a Catholic background I am in the dilemma of either remaining silent when the position of the RC Church is mis-represented (as I find it ALWAYS is by non-Catholics in this forum), or jumping in and having to defend something I might not fully agree with on the grounds that at least the real position needs to be acknowledged and if I don’t say what it is, no-one else will.

• Alix 27th Mar '08 - 5:20pm

  Matthew, I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t think it applies here. He said this on his blog. He was hardly being put under pressure for a quick reply to anything. It was his considered solution to a perceived problem.

• Li Zhao 20th Apr '08 - 11:15pm

  Hold on a second, before descending into pointless Tory bashing or falling quickly into the knee-jerk taboos surrounding any invocation of eugenics consider that John Ward might actually have a point:

  He isn’t suggesting compulsory sterilisation of a section of society. He’s suggesting that if families heavily reliant on benefit go on to have a certain number of children then at some threshold number of children certain classes of their benefits should become contingent on sterilisation.

  The benefit recipient doesn’t have to choose to have so many kids, just as he might not necessarily have to receive benefits if he didn’t have kids in the first place. If he refuses to claim welfare he won’t be sterilized. In fact the current system is so constructed that in some cases there is a perverse economic incentive to have kids because doing so brings in more benefits. Now if he were suggesting forcible sterilization of a lower socio-economic group regardless of any decisions those people have made, it would be a gross violation of liberty and totally fascist, but given the choices to a) have children and b) accept government benefits conditionally there is no violation of rights occurring here. It’s simply a case of compulsory versus voluntary sterlisation and with the latter in this case its to the benefit of the existent children, society at large and probably for the benefit recipient’s own good.

  Where people do have serious objections to this its likely to be for religious reasons concerning the right of anybody, including the individual, to denigrate the reproductive capacity of the human body. Fortunately we live in a secular society.

• passing tory 21st Apr '08 - 5:02am

  It is fascinating to see the impact of population being openly discussed; although it is an important area it is such a potential minefield (as the article at the head proves).

  Is 70m people a sensible population for the UK? I think it depends what you want, in terms of impact on the environment, usage of resources and so on. I don’t think that anyone should believe that a population in the UK of 70m is going to suddenly descend into a canabalistic orgy of Malthusian J-curve disaster. But it is certainly true that, in adapting the environment to his own needs, man will definitely force other species to adapt their behaviour or struggle to survive. In this sense, I think that population is central to the environmental question.

  It also strikes me as crass to say that it is OK for the UK to have such a high population density and yet pin the world’s problems on India and China, and the USA. The USA, in particular, is a remarkably under-populated country by European standards (with a population density practically one tenth of the UK).
  Should we really object if a country chooses to organise its affairs so that it has a relatively low population and relatively high consumption per capita?

  Now, I suppose we can just take the chance that, as affluence tends to be the best contraceptive, that we can just hope that if we help the whole world become nice and rich that the sums balance out and a sustainable population will be reached. However, this seems like a bit of a long shot to me, so I think that population management is a matter that should concern politicians who have any interest in long-term conservation of the planet’s current ecosystems.

  Of course, for this to happen, you need rational debate and this is unlikely as long as Mark and his like are eager to score political points against anyone who wades in with an unorthodox view.