2021-08-13
The latest paper from Migration Watch "Immigration and population change in the UK's towns and cities" contains a great deal of detail and paints a picture of immigration being encouraged in practice by our government even as its words pretend that they are determined to get it under control.
There is plainly much to get one's head around but the message is unambiguous - most our present population explosion and the associated demand for housing is driven by immigration.
I note that the UK (at around 280 heads per sq kilometre) is already one of the most densely populated countries in Europe - if we exclude the minor nations then England (407 heads/km2) carries the lion's share of that population, and of the main European nations is second only to Netherlands in population density.
So the problems that this growth may promote include:
- Concreting over our countryside, parks, farms and common land, for housing
- Increasing levels of cultural barriers, leading to the possibility of misunderstandings confusions and senses of grievance
- Importation of religious zealotry previously foreign to these isles
- Abandonment of rational response to such problems by a governing class obsessed with image over substance, emotion over logic, and "woke" dogma of all kinds over our practical British attitudes and traditions that have stood the test of time and immigration quite well so far
The "problem" of immigration has been with us for ever, or at least since the post-WW II years when people from the Caribbean were invited to come and work in the UK. Despite an unpromising response from many indigenous English, we managed to overcome the initial racial tensions and became a country at relative ease with its various constituent parts; in no small measure this was due to the slow pace of overall immigration over the early part of that period.
It was also due to the inescapable fact that most people regardless of origin just want to get on with their lives, raise their families, and cooperate with their neighbours. Our British traditions of tolerance and fair play turned out to be shared by most of those who came here - maybe they are not uniquely British traditions after all!
None of this is to downplay the problems listed above, but it does give us hope for the future as well as items of caution - of which Item 4 above is in my estimation the most problematic, as it actively militates against finding any rational solutions to the remainder.
