At this rate, Polly Toynbee will be Ann Farmer before she even realises it:
People are a good thing, the most precious
resource in a rich economy, so the progressive-minded feel. Only misanthropists
disagree or the dottier Malthusians who send green-ink tweets deploring any
state assistance for child-rearing.
So Thursday's population figures from the Office for National Statistics are unalloyed good news, for young and old, for the economy and wellbeing. But only if we seize the opportunity to plan well.
Last year the UK population grew by 0.7% to 63.7 million – another 419,900 people alive and kicking. That's the biggest population growth in the EU.
Germany's numbers are falling fast to their great consternation. Italy is emptying out. France does better with its strong pro-natalist tradition favouring familles nombreuses. The ONS is calling us "a young country".
Our birth rate is at its highest for 40 years. That's mainly due to the bulge cycle as my postwar generation who had our children in the 1970s and early 80s now sprout grandchildren. (I have five, a good friend is about to have her tenth, all under five.)
This is all good: new life, new workers, new consumers, defying the gloomier forecasts that the depleted ratio of workers to old folk would sink the young under the weight of pensions and caring duties.
A quarter of last year's babies have mothers who were born abroad, up 6% on a decade ago – but, says the ONS, they are not the main reason for the increase in the birth rate.
One reason for population growth is people living longer. The great change is in men's survival, with those over 75 up by 26% in 11 years, compared with 6% for women.
This comes from less smoking and safer conditions at work, combined with the NHS's improvement in cancer, stroke and heart survival rates.
More old men and fewer widows is good news, with only a small increase in the ratio of workers to retirees.
Migration figures are what hits the headlines, causing the government most anxiety. With only two years left to meet Cameron's entirely irrational target to reduce net migration to "tens of thousands", still 165,600 more arrived than departed last year.
What can he do – encourage mass migration of Brits to Gibraltar or the Spanish costa del retirement? The idea that curbing immigration depends not only on numbers arriving but on the random numbers leaving makes this one of the government's more monumentally improbable policies.
Of course borders must be strictly controlled, but it picks on the easiest group to bar – foreign students. Ignoring pleas from all the universities, it continues to squeeze out this £8bn earner.
Despite Cameron's trade trip to India, 24% fewer Indian students and 28% fewer postgraduates came last year, rebuffed by the extreme barriers to visas compared with the US or Germany.
Whether they stay or go after graduating, why wouldn't we welcome bright and wealthy foreign students here?
Gavin Barwell, the brave Tory MP who co-founded Migration Matters to support productive immigration, says these valuable students are turned away by the tone of our migration debate: that's no surprise since at the click of a mouse they see their countries called "bongo bongo land", with precious little welcome from any other political quarter.
How much do we want to cut net migration anyway, when the Office for Budget Responsibility warns that if it were stopped, the UK's public sector debt would rise from 74% of GDP today to 187% by the middle years of this century?
But the value of migration depends on who benefits. Too often it has been used to hold down wages and avoid skills training.
The details of these figures hide other good news. There are fewer stillbirths, and the number of those aged 16 and under giving birth has fallen by 34% from a decade ago.
Was that a result of Labour's teen pregnancy prevention programme – if so what happens now it's dismantled? Or is this part of the same phenomenon that sees fewer boys committing crime, as both girls and boys stay on in education longer?
Families are not getting bigger but shrinking: there are more one-child families than a decade ago, fewer with two children, fewer with three, and so on.
A very small number of large families are concentrated in a few areas – such as south Asians in Tower Hamlets, but foreign-born mothers now have just 0.4 more children than UK-born mothers and the gap keeps narrowing.
All this looks almost unequivocally good news for the future. I can hear environmentalists' cries of woe – of course more people means an urgent need to cut each person's carbon footprint. Indeed, all this is only good news if the country makes the right choices.
The former chief statistician gave vent recently to her frustration at politicians' failure to take note of population figures to plan.
Why too few primary schools, when the babies were born four years ago? Why waste precious cash on free schools, instead of primary places? Why cut capital for school buildings – nurseries are closing, only 500 Sure Starts left with any nursery provision?
The Institute for Public Policy Research has just delivered a blistering report on Ofsted's useless nursery ratings, finding "no statistical relationship" between Ofsted gradings and quality of care.
To remedy the situation where a three-year-old of professional parents has twice the vocabulary of a child from the poorest social group, it calls for 12,000 more graduate nursery teachers.
And where is this bursting population to live? These figures should be the springboard for a massive house-building programme. The ONS finds the population has grown overwhelmingly in the south-east, but barely in the north-east.
Will we for ever channel everyone southwards for a job, or northwards for a home with no job? Immigration may be a great good for GDP – but will all GDP growth still go to the top few percent, with all cost born by low earners?
Only a living wage can stop the use of migrants to undercut wages. High-skilled migrants are no asset if their presence is exploited by cheapskate employers to duck their duty to offer German-style apprenticeships and training to the UK young.
Instead of shrinking the state, services – the NHS, rail, universities, libraries, swimming pools and museums – all need to expand to meet demand. These babies will bring more tax wealth, but let it not be greater private riches and public squalor.
If their wealth is not to be better shared for the common good, then we shall lose the advantage they promise and a bigger population may feel more of a curse than a blessing.
So Thursday's population figures from the Office for National Statistics are unalloyed good news, for young and old, for the economy and wellbeing. But only if we seize the opportunity to plan well.
Last year the UK population grew by 0.7% to 63.7 million – another 419,900 people alive and kicking. That's the biggest population growth in the EU.
Germany's numbers are falling fast to their great consternation. Italy is emptying out. France does better with its strong pro-natalist tradition favouring familles nombreuses. The ONS is calling us "a young country".
Our birth rate is at its highest for 40 years. That's mainly due to the bulge cycle as my postwar generation who had our children in the 1970s and early 80s now sprout grandchildren. (I have five, a good friend is about to have her tenth, all under five.)
This is all good: new life, new workers, new consumers, defying the gloomier forecasts that the depleted ratio of workers to old folk would sink the young under the weight of pensions and caring duties.
A quarter of last year's babies have mothers who were born abroad, up 6% on a decade ago – but, says the ONS, they are not the main reason for the increase in the birth rate.
One reason for population growth is people living longer. The great change is in men's survival, with those over 75 up by 26% in 11 years, compared with 6% for women.
This comes from less smoking and safer conditions at work, combined with the NHS's improvement in cancer, stroke and heart survival rates.
More old men and fewer widows is good news, with only a small increase in the ratio of workers to retirees.
Migration figures are what hits the headlines, causing the government most anxiety. With only two years left to meet Cameron's entirely irrational target to reduce net migration to "tens of thousands", still 165,600 more arrived than departed last year.
What can he do – encourage mass migration of Brits to Gibraltar or the Spanish costa del retirement? The idea that curbing immigration depends not only on numbers arriving but on the random numbers leaving makes this one of the government's more monumentally improbable policies.
Of course borders must be strictly controlled, but it picks on the easiest group to bar – foreign students. Ignoring pleas from all the universities, it continues to squeeze out this £8bn earner.
Despite Cameron's trade trip to India, 24% fewer Indian students and 28% fewer postgraduates came last year, rebuffed by the extreme barriers to visas compared with the US or Germany.
Whether they stay or go after graduating, why wouldn't we welcome bright and wealthy foreign students here?
Gavin Barwell, the brave Tory MP who co-founded Migration Matters to support productive immigration, says these valuable students are turned away by the tone of our migration debate: that's no surprise since at the click of a mouse they see their countries called "bongo bongo land", with precious little welcome from any other political quarter.
How much do we want to cut net migration anyway, when the Office for Budget Responsibility warns that if it were stopped, the UK's public sector debt would rise from 74% of GDP today to 187% by the middle years of this century?
But the value of migration depends on who benefits. Too often it has been used to hold down wages and avoid skills training.
The details of these figures hide other good news. There are fewer stillbirths, and the number of those aged 16 and under giving birth has fallen by 34% from a decade ago.
Was that a result of Labour's teen pregnancy prevention programme – if so what happens now it's dismantled? Or is this part of the same phenomenon that sees fewer boys committing crime, as both girls and boys stay on in education longer?
Families are not getting bigger but shrinking: there are more one-child families than a decade ago, fewer with two children, fewer with three, and so on.
A very small number of large families are concentrated in a few areas – such as south Asians in Tower Hamlets, but foreign-born mothers now have just 0.4 more children than UK-born mothers and the gap keeps narrowing.
All this looks almost unequivocally good news for the future. I can hear environmentalists' cries of woe – of course more people means an urgent need to cut each person's carbon footprint. Indeed, all this is only good news if the country makes the right choices.
The former chief statistician gave vent recently to her frustration at politicians' failure to take note of population figures to plan.
Why too few primary schools, when the babies were born four years ago? Why waste precious cash on free schools, instead of primary places? Why cut capital for school buildings – nurseries are closing, only 500 Sure Starts left with any nursery provision?
The Institute for Public Policy Research has just delivered a blistering report on Ofsted's useless nursery ratings, finding "no statistical relationship" between Ofsted gradings and quality of care.
To remedy the situation where a three-year-old of professional parents has twice the vocabulary of a child from the poorest social group, it calls for 12,000 more graduate nursery teachers.
And where is this bursting population to live? These figures should be the springboard for a massive house-building programme. The ONS finds the population has grown overwhelmingly in the south-east, but barely in the north-east.
Will we for ever channel everyone southwards for a job, or northwards for a home with no job? Immigration may be a great good for GDP – but will all GDP growth still go to the top few percent, with all cost born by low earners?
Only a living wage can stop the use of migrants to undercut wages. High-skilled migrants are no asset if their presence is exploited by cheapskate employers to duck their duty to offer German-style apprenticeships and training to the UK young.
Instead of shrinking the state, services – the NHS, rail, universities, libraries, swimming pools and museums – all need to expand to meet demand. These babies will bring more tax wealth, but let it not be greater private riches and public squalor.
If their wealth is not to be better shared for the common good, then we shall lose the advantage they promise and a bigger population may feel more of a curse than a blessing.
Polly writes that Britain's overcrowding is "good" and means "more workers, more consumers".
ReplyDeleteShe sounds more and more like the capitalists she claims to despise.
Its not "good" for the settled communities, in Slough and Dagenham and Boston and London, torn asunder by globalisation and mass migration.
It's not "good" for the countryside soon to be paved over to house our enormous population.
It's not "good" for those who have to suffer the competition for jobs, public services, housing and schools which immigration brings.
Not to mention the classrooms where English is the minority language and the English children the minority group, and the council estates where shanty towns are springing up in people's gardens.
"the dottier Malthusians who send green-ink tweets deploring any state assistance for child-rearing."
Yes, myself and Peter Hitchens are among those "dotty Malthusians" who feel that state assistance for unmarried mothers is state replacement of fathers-and state action against marriage.
Peter's idea that, nine months hence, all future child benefits should cease, is an excellent one.
I'm proud to be among those "dotty Malthusians" who don't support the abolition of marriage among the poor which has resulted from the anti-father welfare state (and the anti-father divorce laws) created by people of Polly's stripe.
Polly is not even a "champagne socialist" any more-she's just an old joke now.
Thank God she's here-if she didn't exist, the Right would have to invent her.
That is no more than 40 per cent of this growth, if it is that.
ReplyDeleteA population group which refuses to have children, and indeed defines itself against others in close proximity precisely by that refusal, can only expect to be replaced.
But that no longer seems to be what is happening. You ought to be pleased.
You are basing your figures on Cameron's deceptive claims to have "cut" immigration-see the Public Administration Committee report on that one.
ReplyDeleteOr read this
http://metro.co.uk/2013/07/28/uk-immigration-figures-little-better-than-a-guess-3901272/
No, I have not.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, I dispute the notion that "a population group" (by which you presumably mean the indigenous people of Britain) is "refusing" to have children.
ReplyDeleteThere are an array of perverse incentives in favour of non-standard arrangements for child-rearing (i.e. the wholesale state sponsorship of illegitimacy), while the traditional heterosexual, monogamous marriage has been (and continues to be) subject to a sustained, multi-pronged attack.
Incidentally, I dispute the notion that "a population group" (by which you presumably mean the indigenous people of Britain) is "refusing" to have children.
ReplyDeleteSo do I.
The people whom you mean, the eaters of fish and chips (Jewish-Huguenot fusion food from the streets of the East End), have stopped doing any such thing.
The Guardian is pleased, so I suppose that it is no wonder that you are not.
But I am. This way, we have to build and maintain houses, schools, hospitals, railways, and so very much more besides. Let's get on with it.
So we have to maintain infrastructure, David (and not merely for Huguenot/Jewish-descended people (formerly) from the East End). For whom are we maintaining it, now and in the future? Cui bono? Although he's a windbag, and not a little barmy, Roger Scruton has some illuminating things to say about nationhood.
ReplyDelete