I thought this was worth sharing, from BueSky:
The idea that there is anything exceptional about the number of people living in the UK who were not born here is quite absurd.
Most successful countries have many more people born outside their countries living in them.
Migration is normal, healthy, and wealth-generating.
So what are we making a fuss about? Or is it really that the Cult of Nigel really is all about racism?
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Increasing the population is not really sustainable in environmental terms – we have a problem getting enough food and water now.
That’s the world as a whole, not here
Please do not be small minded
And remember the impact of climate change
I am not being small minded just pointing out the reality of the situation. The UK population is too high.
So, who are you going to cull? How, and how will you manage the transition? Please explain. Trite comments of this sort can only be permitted with justification. So, provide it.
Beware if you update Firefox browser you will loose all your links. I have lost over 100, some 10 years worth.
I do not use it, and have not done so for a very long time, but thanks for sharing the warning.
“we have a problem getting enough food and water now.”
But do we really? We throw away between 1/3 to 1/2 of the food bought in Britain as it is, and we are significantly overweight as a population, so I cannot believe your assertion.
As to water, we have plenty of it, but Nimbyism stops the construction of the necessary reservoirs in which to store it.
None of this has anything to do with migration, of course.
What are you citing?
I did not say this.
@ Robert,
Schrödinger’s oldies?
Alive [and living well beyond their life expectancy at birth], but not alive [for the purpose of blaming migrants for population growth]?
The problem moving forward seems to be that there won’t be enough people rather than over-population thanks to massive and continuing falls in fertility rates worldwide.
Professor Tom Murphy gives a good overview of the issue here:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/06/peak-population-projections/
So we have a situation in which the Western politicians have a dual benefit from immigration: they need the extra workers and they can also demonise them to excuse the failings of neoliberalism.
The mainstream news media seem to be waking up to this with articles like this appearing in the Guardian recently:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/02/young-women-england-wales-likely-have-just-one-child-35-ons-study
And as the article notes pro-natalist movements are growing in the US with both the Musk rat and Farage calling for people to have more babies. Magaret Atwood’s work is looking very prophetic at the moment.
This is the theme of tomorrow’s video amd my colum in The National tomorrow as well.
Robert: what is your estimate of the long term sustainable population of the UK, taking account of the available food, water, energy etc? And how would you propose to get there?
(I’ll just note that the world population is estimated to be around 8 billion currently so the UK is about 1%. The total is estimated to peak around 10 billion by the end of this century.)
Robert: what is your estimate of the long term sustainable population of the UK, taking account of the available food, water, energy etc?
and, Robert: Do you mean UK produced food, water, energy etc, or would you include internationally obtained resources?
That 10 billion peak figure is outdated and incorrect because it does not take account of the falling fertility rates, see the Tom Murphy link I supplied in my other post in this thread for more details.
A more accurate maximum figure looks to be ~8.5 billion occurring before the middle of this century. Looks like microplastics may have solved the population problem by killing our fertility.
Robert
What is NOT sustainable is not building reservoirs and other means of investment in infrastructure or public services (health, education) and having austerity instead.
For example, where are the desalination plants we might need in the future to secure a fresh water supply all year round? Where are the coastal defences and inner waterway flood defences we need?
It is not necessarily human expansion that is the problem; it’s the cack-handed way it is done, obsessed with ‘saving money’ that is there to be used. We have the technology to solve these problems in a sustainable way but people like you wringing their hands over ‘too many people’ when there are parts of the world already becoming inhabitable because of the stupidity of those living today!!
I agree that population is something that needs to be monitored and considered if only because we can’t look after the people we have now, never mind those meant to come in the future.
Get over yourself – it’s not my blog but folk like you really get up my nose.
Where is the plan to dam The Wash, which is vital to preserve the best agricultural land in England.
Much to agree with in what you say.
BS.
Around 10% of *England* is urbanised (I have used England as it is the most densley populated in the uk). Around 80% of the UK population live in urban areas. If we doubled our population, we could easily accommodate everyone.
As for sustainability, well in 2024 China accounted for 64% of all new renewable infrastructure in the world, and they were able to take on and beat USA at the tariff game, thus proving that investment in renewables, hence sustainability, is the way forward.
@Robert
“I am not being small minded just pointing out the reality of the situation. The UK population is too high.”
Robert, I must respectfully disagree with your statement.
The UK, like the USA, does NOT have an over population problem.
The UK, like the USA, has a population distribution problem and a population demographics problem.
To get more specific by country, England, just like the USA, has a population distribution problem.
To get more specific by country, Scotland and Wales need more population of permanent full time residents.
The USA, England, Scotland and Wales all have a population demographics problem.
Much to agree with
You are right to point this out.
It has been seized upon by the austerity brigade who are using the pain and suffering they have created to blame immigration instead and throw people off the scent that it is the pro-austerity civil servants and politicians who are the problem along with their rich donors.
PS My response to your post yesterday may be tomorrow now
I don’t demand one!
On my second post to yesterday’s, I know what I meant but may not have expressed myself well.
Neural divergence comes in many flavours and I was only reflecting on what was maybe one of them, and I have a lot to learn obviously. But my actual point – ill expressed perhaps – is that we live in a time when more dangerous thinking is portrayed as beneficial to mankind, and the more harmless traits in society are picked on as the problems. It’s very unfair indeed.
I worked with an LGB&T group in housing for some time, and I worked with transgender people. I found them to be a group within a group and some of the nicest, harmless, misunderstood people I’ve ever worked with. Period. They have a world all of their own, yet looking at recent events – you’d think the world was swarming with them and they were out to threaten ‘our way of life’.
It’s ridiculous and appalling.
The people who really want to kill us and destroy our way of life are those at the top, controlling and pulling levers to cover themselves up, never mind some awkward teenager with ADHD.
Most of the discussion/froth (it ain’t a “debate” that would require some rationalism) is a numbers-free zone.
Its all about “feelings innit?” “all these furriners on the streets, lookin at me funny”, “furriner groomin gangs”, “funny furriner food in furriner shops” etc.
The problem is that on the one hand furriner owned media stirs up people that have been stuffed economically & point at the “furriners” as the cause (= “oh look – a squirrel) .
LINO is functionally incapable of addressing this (the economics) because to do so would destroy Reeves fairy stories. What to do? I am not sure that taking a rational approach/rational arguments will work with the segment (a very large one) that has been fed lies and feels (rightly) very poorly off.
I’ve said this in the youtube comments in response to another commenter, on your video about migration last week, but it’s worth repeating:
This ‘immigration’ conversation has been going on for 20 years, and for 20 years people have complained about ‘not being able to talk about it’ because people kept calling them out for their awful views.
The core anti-immigration constituency is racist and xenophobic; their position is and has always been ‘we must kick out all the brown- immigrants. Kick out all the immigrants.’
They cannot be appeased by anything short of ethnic cleansing. A lot of them are in the cult of Nigel, but some consider Nigel too left-wing (BNP/EDL/etc types).
Beyond them, however, are people with concerns that can actually be met. EG people don’t like the small boats crossings because they feel unfair, and also are very dangerous (if only people focused on the danger first, but alas). This is addressable by safe routes, which the Mail, Telegraph, and racists (but I repeat myself) would hate, but would solve the problem.
Labour got rid of the Tory rule that immigrant workers in certain sectors had to be paid 20% less, which largely puts a stop to any arguments about immigrant labour undercutting domestic labour.
Labour is also getting rid of the asylum hotels and returning to rented accommodation, which is a good thing, but seemingly only because the hotels are too costly.
It would not be hard to dismantle the anti-immigrant argument through policy, but that would require vision that is evidently beyond Morgan ‘Blue Labour’ McSweeney and Pat ‘Private Sector’ McFadden.
Sadly, I have to agree that there is a fundamental racist and xenophobic mindset in existence that underpins the ineffective approaches employed by government to address immigration. Instead of recognising and addressing this, short-term, knee-jerk, Dog-whistle politics are used instead to pander to this quite disgusting mindset. I recognise that the people who have, or express, these views will not even listen to rational, factual information relating to immigration. For example, although not specifically on immigration, the article in the Guardian yesterday ‘It feels like we never left’: resentment builds in one of UK’s firmest Brexit-backing areas’ (Thurrock) was dreadful to read. Small-minded and essentially racist and xenophobia in tone, it made me ashamed to be part of the UK.
On a positive note: John Swinney ((First Minister for Scotland) publicly disagreed with Starmer’s comments and the Scottish government policy still remains one of recognising the potential benefits of immigration.
Although possibly naive, we need to ‘call-out’ and expose the ignorance of racism and xenophobia and not allow it to be dressed-up as gaining our sovereignty, the good of England, some (perverse) form of the Blitz spirit, etc. It is simply an expression of ignorance, racism, xenophobia, meanness of spirit, anti-fellow humans, etc. It is clear that Fart Rage (Farage) is tapping into this ignorance. We should all name those that follow his credo for what they are – fascist, racist, xenophobic and, fundamentally, ignorant.
I had a ‘small win’ last week. An acquaitance in the pub was complaining about the small boats and illegal immigration, and we got into a discussion about ‘illegal immigration’. Her main argument was that they were jumping the queue and she was worried about the danger. I asked how else they were supposed to get here. She believed they could just apply at the nearest British embassy and get a visa. I explained the impossibility of a refugee getting a visa and the requirement of the Britich government that only those physically present in the UK could apply for asylum here, while banning transport providers from transporting anyone without proper dcumentation. She went very quiet.
This week she told me that we could stop the small boats by letting people apply at any British embassy. Result!
Well done.
Demographics. Since the 1970s the number of people born in the UK has not been much more than the number of people dying each year. There is a excess huge bulge of people born from the 1940s to the 1960s who are now in or approaching retirement, and not enough people to look after them. And we don’t train enough people with the skills we need, from bricklayers and plumbers to doctors and nurses. We need to import young, fit, motivated, educated people. If we don’t do that gradually, we will end up with a demographic emergency within a decade or two.
See tomorrow’s video….
@Andrew
“And we don’t train enough people with the skills we need, from bricklayers and plumbers to doctors and nurses.”
Why is England reluctant to train people as brickys, sparkys, chippys plus piepys & fitters? The USA does not do a bang-up job in this department but they do a much better job than England.
Why is England reluctant to train people as doctors, nurses and other ancillary medical providers. The USA does an excellent job at this. The USA has a “healthcare worker” distribution problem not an overall “healthcare worker” shortage.
Why are people so reluctant to be trained in these skills?
My partner finished her training to be a nurse a few years ago – her class was full but not all of them were even guaranteed a job at the end.
I’ve been told that the wards are often understaffed and they rely on getting in private agency staff on sky high day-rates to fill in gaps; many of them from overseas and shuttled around the country wherever needed that day/week, so I very much doubt they can have much stability or are getting a fair shake of these ridiculous agency fees either. It is a completely ridiculous situation – British nursing training is widely considered some of the very best in the world and they are woefully underutilised.
You mentioned the word cull I did not or imply it. Just stated the obvious that we should not allow the population to continue to increase.
Your time here is over.
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/05/18/we-are-not-overwhelmed-by-migrants/#comment-1021253
@Ben Oldfield
?phone or PC?
I think it is “refreshing” Firefox that cleans out your data, I’ve never known it happen on a normal update. Even a reinstall should preserve them. Check whether Firefox is perhaps now using a different profile, your old firefox profile may still be around but firefox is no longer using it?
If you have a Mozilla ID and have ever sync’d your browser using it you may be able to get them back that way.
Firefox also has the option of backing up bookmarks to a file – usually called bookmarks.html.
Some of these links may be useful
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=recovering+firefox+bookmarks&t=fpas&ia=web
Good luck!
Robertj. I found the directory and files and reinstalled them. I also have CCleaner as second browser. I am a great believer in belt and braces. I even has a backup laptop.
Good news! I hate things like that when they happen and I seek to backup everything.
In response to the implicit “there is no room left in the UK” nature of this there is (and I apologise in advance for the convolution of this but it is worth the effort) a community in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Michigan that lives at the density of 7,000 people per square mile. It includes parks, schools, churches etc. A quick perusal on Google maps street view gives a good indication of what sort of community it is.
At 7000 people per square mile the whole of the UK population would fit into a circle centred on, approximately, Heathrow and extending to Wellingborough in the north, Colchester and Canterbury in the east, Brighton in the south and Salisbury in the west. I would argue that by far the greatest majority of us would be more than happy to live in the tree-lined boulevard type environment of Whitefish Bay whilst giving the lie to the “country is full” rubbish.
Ps…. I’m more than happy for my workings to be validated (or not) 68,000,000 people / 7000 requires 9714sqm. Using pi/r squared = 9714 gives a radius of appx 55.6 miles.
To address employment shortages effectively, a net migration target of around 400,000 – 450,000 is probably required. Achieving this without societal disruption requires substantial investment in social housing, infrastructure, and compassionate integration programs, coupled with robust protections against labour exploitation and environmental degradation. This needs to be our focus.
This seems reasonable to me
That’s an annual target, by the way.
Did my first message not arrive – annual target of about 400,000-450,000 plus how to cope?
I have been out. I can’t moderate all the time. I do my best, but I can’t spend all my time on this blog.
Sorry. I’m impatient for justice. So are you.
🙂
Guy Shrubsole’s research gives the lie to overcrowded UK:
‘Half of England is owned by less than 1% of its population, according to new data shared with the Guardian that seeks to penetrate the secrecy that has traditionally surrounded land ownership.
The findings, described as “astonishingly unequal”, suggest that about 25,000 landowners – typically members of the aristocracy and corporations – have control of half of the country.’
‘Shrubsole writes that the bulk of the population owns very little land or none at all. Those who own homes in England, in total, own only 5% of the country.
He calculates that the land under the ownership of the royal family amounts to 1.4% of England. This includes the Crown Estate, the Queen’s personal estate at Sandringham, Norfolk, and the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, which provide income to members of the family.’
I also remember a statistic that there is only public access allowed to 10% of the country.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/apr/17/who-owns-england-thousand-secret-landowners-author
Thanks
I’m sad to say many fellow citizens have had their brains ‘fried’ by constant media repetition of lies about immigration, people on benefits and the dangers of any sort of efforts to help make the UK a more caring country. The same media has form going back to Victorian times, even supporting fascism and ridiculing the idea of universal suffrage.
I really don’t think anything will change their tune because, as others have mentioned, there is a rump of fellow citizens ( I estimate about 15%) who are supportive of this approach.
Actually, I think the media are really only interested in making money, and demonising others always seems to them the best and easiest way to do it.
They do get the goat of decent folks who shun this nonsense and prefer to think for themselves. At least we can sleep easily knowing we are wise to what is really happening in the land.
If you happen to listen to James O’Brien on LBC radio, you’ll find he has the measure of these people.
Every time I thought I was understanding this debate it took a new turn. Here is where I am with some of this, I won’t live long enough to cover it all:
People who criticise immigrants should be flogged with a mouldy old lettuce and made to stand on the naughty child step. They can get down when they grow a brain. Granted we might need to build more steps. They could be there a long time.
We might need more reservoirs as well but equally we need to sort out the leaky water distribution, much of it caused by buck passing. Grow up children of the water companies and do your job. Likewise land owners who leave pipes leaking for years.
The uk should meter every dwelling and fine those that circumvent the said meter. No good if extra reservoirs just results in greener lawns. Let lawns go a pretty yellow. Meters will make that happen.
We need to grow more and more healthy food so supplies are less vulnerable. To do that we need labour. Immigration might just help with that though we would need a proper tracking system I suppose. Students working in agriculture and horticulture through their vacations could have their loans paid off, thus making harvesting of fruits more possible. This would be paid for by increased NI and tax on student spending. We also have to pay farmers to keep ditches clear as a flooding defence. Farmers should also store run off rainwater on-site, become organic, adopt no plough farming techniques and make use of geothermal green houses to grow round the year. Supermarkets should be fined if they don’t reduce food miles. In short, farms are nowhere near maxing out on output in a eco friendly and sustainable way. And please put solar panels on the empty roofs of farm buildings.
I’ll stop. The big point is, don’t let the racists distract by talking about immigrants. Focus on better farming, better water management and huge investments needed in renewables and public services. Can’t begin to scratch the surface on any of this without tacking the inequality pandemic that plagues our nation.
I think we need to be a bit careful about describing the retired as economically inactive. Almost everyone I know who no longer has a paid job and is over 65 spends time (1) caring for others over 70, many of the older ones being high dependency (2) caring for children and grandchildren of those who might not otherwise be able to work and (3) keeping vital civic and welfare institutions going on a voluntary basis (councillors, Citizens’ Advice, you name it). We may not really freely choose to do (1) and (2). We MUST revisit some of these economic categories we’re busy constructing for others. I’d love to know the proper economic cost of all this unpaid work NOT being carried out. In the same way, it would also, I suggest, be interesting to look at the additional unpaid contributions of migrants. I’d be interested to know if anyone has looked at that.
In essence all these issues are ignored in antio nal income.
Obliquely, there will be a blog about this in the morning.
The stupidity of humanity and most particularly of think-tanks and politicians never ceases to amaze me.
If population decline is a problem for a nation, then there is a very simple and logical solution available which doesn’t require incentives to breed.
There are already tens of millions of people being displaced by climate change across the world, mostly in the global south.
Provide a route for these people to migrate to countries with current or impending population deficits and spend the money that would be spent on ridiculous birthing bonuses to citizens, dysfunctional border control efforts and the like, on housing those migrants instead and educating them, (if necessary), linguistically, culturally and socially to equip them to live and contribute in the countries they have migrated to.
In reality, as the climate crisis escalates, which it will do because no-one, particularly in the west, is actually taking sufficient meaningful action to mitigate the escalation, we are going to see massive increases in migration across the globe and an unstoppable proportion of that is going to arrive at our borders.
An intelligent government would be planning on how to address that and how to capitalise on the influx, instead of waving flags and baying jingoist messages.
We are all going to see a fall in our standard of living because of climate change – we could either act now to plan and prepare for the migration aspect of that and perhaps minimize the reduction in living conditions, and maybe even devise ways to prevent some of the worst effects, or we can put our heads in the sand and wait for a moment when it will be too late to minimize anything.
Social media is full of nonsensical chatter about the “climate change debate” – there is no debate. Climate change is here, it is happening across the planet and if we had half a brain as a species we would already have escalated it beyond all of the collective wars and facile conflicts we occupy ourselves with and fund; we would be devoting all of our energies in a concerted peaceful global effort to address it, including the enormous migration it is beginning to drive.
A glance at history should be enough to inform anyone that humanity is a migrant species that migrates en masse to avoid natural events that necessitate a change in location. The fact that we have made some industrial and technological advances doesn’t change that one iota. We have as much chance of stemming climate migration as the Sumerians had of stemming the tribes that swept down from the Anatolian highlands driven by hunger and a need for space and subsumed thei.
And on the issue of our UK capacity to accommodate migrants, so long as we have 106,000+ unfilled vacancies in the NHS, 131,000 unfilled vacancies in social care, 500,000+ unfilled vacancies in the farming sector, 45,000 unfilled vacancies in the transport sector and 84,000 unfilled vacancies in the hospitality sector, and many others besides, we don’t have a migrant problem, we have a migration deficit; we don’t have too many people – we have too few.
Politicians have a border fetish but homo sapiens is born without a border gene.
Thank you, Richard. A picture can be worth many words. I’ve saved a copy of this, to remind me UK is very average on this statistic. Agree with many comments, I must read the rest.
We need people to come here and do all sorts of jobs because lots of us are retired, or soon to hang up our boots. Some of us need help putting our boots on. Old or young, most of us rely on the NHS which has a very diverse workforce. Our economy is not going to improve if we don’t allow migrant labour. Apple harvesting or stem-cell harvesting, all needed.
Our economy would also benefit from improving the lives of people disadvantaged by the current system – decent benefits, job creation, sound support services. Anyone with a want or need is demonised somewhere in the media. The relentless anti-migration stories might have less traction if hope and purchasing power grew, if fear of lack and feelings of helplessness receded. Thanks to the economics teaching here, I know we can afford this, where we have the other requisite resources. We can afford to look after people seeking asylum, and desperate migrants entering the country clandestinely. We should do so kindly.
The horrors of WWII are hard to comprehend and seem distant. What is also distant or unknown for most (I mean broadly in UK) is the mixing of people in the forces, toffs and Tommies if you like, and the feeling that ‘ordinary people’ deserved better lives in the peace that followed. I’m not saying it was perfect, but it was significant. Margaret Thatcher was the figurehead for the movement to destroy that, the mouthpiece for the story that ‘there is no such thing as society’. I cannot adequately explain to my children how different things were for me, born in the time of post-war consensus.
Call Humpty Dumpty; never mind the King’s horses and men, we need society to be put back together again. Or at least the 90% who are in or near the quicksand, and any enlightened ones from among the mightily-minted.
For me, (a bit of an introvert) that is a big question, how do we un-splinter ourselves, and see some common ground?
An idea I am still working on